Katalin Lunkan is from Budapest, Hungary and she is the author of the book “The Sultans of Swing.” Namely, for the first time on Dire Straits Blog, she shares her interesting story about how she started writing her book. Also, she gave permission and a chance to all Dire Straits fans from all around the world to download free her book!
For our blog, she said: “My name is Katalin Lunkan, and I live in Budapest, Hungary. I work in civil service, and my qualification originally is a social worker.”
“In the summer of 1988, when I was 14-years-old, I heard Dire Straits for the first time. That was the Communique, second album by Dire Straits. I felt suddenly it was going to be my music. I listened to this album day and night. My brother showed to me this rock band. He likes rock music very much, and he played the guitar, too,” she added.
“I saw the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert on TV in June 1988, and the band played “Money for Nothing,” “Sultans of Swing,” “Brothers in Arms,” and “Solid Rock.” These songs were so amazing, that I knew they would be my favorite rock band.”
“I wanted to get to know all their records, so over several years, I bought all of them. My favorite Dire Straits album is the Love Over Gold, my favorite songs are “Telegraph Road,” and “The Private Investigations.” I think this record is extraordinary evidence of Mark Knopfler’s musical talent. He is a very sensitive songwriter, great, and excellent guitar player,” said Katalin.
“When I was 16-years-old, I have decided to write a book about my favorite British rock band, I had several reasons for writing. Namely, Mark Knopfler’s father came from Hungary, he was born in Miskolc, so I thought it would be great to have a book in Hungary as well. And the second thing is that nobody has written a book of Dire Straits in Hungary yet, so I believed it would be my tall order.”
“First of all I started with collecting kinds of stuff for the book like newspaper articles, interviews, photos, but at the time (1990) there were no foreign musical newspapers, and there was no internet, so it was difficult to get all the necessary information about the band. Finally, I have got the British rock band Dire Straits, which was written by Michael Oldfield and published in 1984. I used some parts of his book, and I translated it to the Hungarian language. I wrote the story of Dire Straits from 1977 to 1992, and I wrote about Mark Knopfler’s soundtracks and his first solo album Golden Heart. The songs were translated by me and a friend of mine, and in the end, the book was completed in 1996.”
“The typescript was in my desk drawer for a long time, because I couldn’t find a publisher. Finally, after many years a friend was of help to me, so I published the book under the name “The Sultans of Swing,” by Apostrophe Publisher in 2011, and sold out a total of 840 copies. In the near future I would like to an extended edition – Mark Knopfler’s solo albums and soundtracks from 1998 to 2019,” she added.
Unfortunately, this book is published only in the Hungarian language, and it is not available in other countries, except Hungary. Because of that, we got permission from Katalin to put here her book for online downloading. Click on the link below and your downloading will start! In 2013, Katalin started to write her Hungarian blog – click here to visit his blog.
Facebook Comments