Arpád Soltész
Political Commentator & Writer , Slovakia/Czech Republic

Arpád was born in 1969 in Czechoslovakia, already an enemy of the state. He was the grandson of a Jewish landowner who was killed in Budapest during the Holocaust and the son of a traitor to the communist regime who was shot in August 1968 while documenting the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops and subsequently fled to the West. 

After graduating from high school, he was allowed to join the ruling working class and work as a mechanic in a textile factory. In August 1989, on the day exactly 10 years after his father’s departure, he emigrated to Germany, where he also tried his hand at the proverbial dishwashing in a restaurant. 

After the fall of the communist regime in November 1989, he returned to Czechoslovakia and began studying translation. In 1994, he organized student protests at the university against the authoritarian regime of the prime minister Vladimír Mečiar. A year later, he left his studies to work at a local newspaper. Gradually, he began to specialize in economic journalism, which inevitably led him to the ties between local mafias, corrupt institutions, the intelligence service and politics. In the 1998 election year that ended the government of Vladimir Mečiar, he was the victim of a physical assault that was never investigated by the police. 

Since 1999, he has worked for several national daily and weekly newspapers and for JOJ  television. Currently, he is a political commentator and columnist. After the murder of Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, he co-founded the Ján Kuciak Investigative Centre and headed it for two years. 

He is also the author of the bestselling books Meat, The Swine and Rage, and his latest novel, The Thief, was published in October 2021. The most successful Slovak film of the same name was based on his novel The Swine. Arpad also wrote the script of the feature film The police war (Vojna policajtov) based on his novel Rage, directed by Rudolf Bierman, released in 2024.