Charles Toth

* Vágsellye, February 27, 1959 – † September 10, 2016, Somorja / literary critic, institutional and scientific organizer, director of the Forum Institute in Somorja ; ; He spent his childhood in the village of Vághosszúfalu. He began his schooling here, completed his upper secondary education in Vágsellye, and graduated from the Galanta Gymnasium in 1978. He obtained a Hungarian-history teaching certificate from the Comenius University in Bratislava in 1983. For years he was an assistant at the Duslo chemical company in Vágsellye, and then from 1987 to 1990 he was an editor at the Madách Publishing House in Bratislava. He participated in the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Hungarian Minority in Czechoslovakia led by Miklós Duray, in Hungarian club life in the Upper Hungary, and in the amateur theater movement. During the change of regime, he took on a political role: on November 16, 1989, he became one of the founders of the political group called the Independent Hungarian Initiative (FMK, later: Hungarian Civic Party – MPP), of which he was the president in 1990–1992, the vice-president of the MPP between 1992–1996, and then the party director until 1998. In Galántán, he founded and has been leading the Forum Social Research Center since then, which later changed its name to the Forum Minority Research Institute and moved its headquarters to Somorja. He is the compiler and editor of several books and book series. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' public body. In 2003 he received the Silver Plaque of the Government of the Slovak Republic, in 2007 the Golden Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, in 2009 the Golden John Memorial Medal, in 2014 the Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit (civilian branch). ; ; Work: Leányvári ébredés, 1994.