My friend Ninon Leader, who has died aged 88, was a many-sided scholar and broadcaster. From 1978 until 1993, living in London, she was senior programme organiser at the Hungarian section of the BBC World Service.
During these years, her radio series The Brits: A User’s Guide was a great success both in Britain and in Hungary. She wrote a book about the London she loved to explore, published in 2012 as Londonban Van, Hej, Sok Számos Utca… (There are Many Streets in London…), with the drawings of Mátyás Sárközi.
Ninon was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family, and survived the second world war on false papers in hiding. Her father, Imre Neményi, was a journalist, who died doing forced labour under the Nazis, so for a couple of years she was in an orphans’ home.
The Scottish Mission where she hid was run by her godmother, the heroic charity worker Jane Haining, who in 1944 was deported by the Nazis and murdered in Auschwitz/Birkenau.
I first met Ninon, who was then married to the poet Endre Kövesi, in the youth section of the Hungarian Writers’ Union, but we became friends only later while studying Hungarian language and literature at ELTE (Budapest University) in the mid-1950s.
Ninon won numerous poetry reciting competitions at the university thanks to her clear, expressive voice and impressive presentation. Though already graduated, she took part in the revolution of October 1956 started by the students, and had to flee Hungary after its brutal suppression by the Soviet army.
Like many Hungarians of the same generation, after arriving in Britain, Ninon obtained a research scholarship to study, in her case at Girton College, Cambridge, where she received a doctorate in 1961.
She had married Eliot Leader, a Cambridge physicist, in 1959, her first marriage having ended in divorce, and travelled with him to the University of California at Berkeley where she taught Hungarian literature from 1962 to 1965. Her doctoral thesis, Hungarian Classical Ballads and Their Folklore, published by Cambridge University Press in 1967 (and reissued in 2011) received many favourable reviews.
On returning from the US, Ninon received a research fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and for some years taught Hungarian there. It was when she and her family moved to London in the 1970s that she joined the Hungarian section of the BBC and became its senior programme organiser for nearly two decades.
Ninon was a most likable person, with a wonderful sense of humour who would invariably end her telephone calls with a new joke or an old anecdote. She kept her cheerfulness as well as her intellectual alertness to the very end of her life.
Ninon is survived by Imre and Darian, the sons from her second marriage, which ended in divorce, and five grandchildren.
