“My desire was precisely to be what I have become,” said the Hungarian poet, novelist and dramatist Magda Szabó in a late interview. “I would not have liked to endanger that prospect by expressing something poorly or making a hash of articulating an idea because that would have had tragic consequences in my career. It would immediately have been turned against me, because so much else has been turned against me.”

Like many, she had been subject to political pressure. The important Baumgarten Prize that she was awarded in 1949 at the age of 29 — a prize won by some of the greatest Hungarian writers of the time — was taken away from her the same year, the year of the Stalinist takeover.

She was sacked from her job at the Ministry of Religion and Education and prevented from publishing until 1958. Like Agnes Nemes Nagy, another leading Hungarian writer and her contemporary, Szabó found work in the meantime teaching in a primary school. Like Nagy, and many others, she was deemed ideologically unsound. Like Nagy she was, eventually, permitted to write for children.

Magda Szabó was born in 1917 in the old provincial city of Debrecen, long a Protestant stronghold. A clever girl, she went from school to read Latin and Hungarian at university before going into teaching and then the Civil Service.

At the same time she was writing poetry. The prize, so quickly given and withdrawn, was for her two books of poetry, Bárány (The Lamb, 1947) and Vissza az emberig (Back to Humanity, 1949). On her return to literature in 1958, nearly two years after the failed 1956 revolution and still in the period of reaction and repression, she published one book of poems, Neszek (Rustlings, 1958) but became known chiefly as a novelist and dramatist and soon gained popularity. She also soon won another important honour, the Attila József prize.

“It was,” she said, “as if those in power were saying, ‘We beg your pardon, dear lady, we seem to have been wrong in our opinion of you. We are very sorry.' You should have seen the face they pulled when I told them: ‘Don't come to me now to apologise because I was never cross. What could you have liked in me? The firm unchanging faith that binds me to heaven?'.”

Szabó was a remarkably productive writer. Of the approximately 45 books to her name, 18 are novels. But there are film scripts and plays and translations and short stories and a travel book too. One of her children stories, Tündér Lala (Lala the Fairy) is regarded as a classic. It concerns Lala, the son of the Queen of Fairyland, a perfectly rational and harmonious place that wants nothing to do with humans. Lala, however, does, and owing to his compassion for humankind, he eventually turns into a human being himself.

The distance from human beings is characteristic of one of the great figures in her adult fiction too, the hardy and ageless housekeeper and cleaning woman, Emerence, who has been struck by every disaster that could happen to a person and has seen the worst human nature can do. She is the chief focus of Szabó's only novel currently available in English, Az ajtó (The Door), beautifully translated by Len Rix.

Emerence's life is based on physical work, and her employer, who is very much like Szabó herself, regards her as an enigmatic, infuriating archetype, almost a figure out of classical mythology, one with tremendous authority who, had she cared for education, might have been running countries. Although Emerence is a firm atheist it is she who says to her author employer, “What must you really think of Christ, of God, when you make pronouncements about him as if he were a personal friend? How cheap you think salvation is! I wouldn't give a farthing for your week's religiosity.”

The Door is a marvellous book dominated by female characters. The husband of the author — an author himself — is rather peripheral, though Emerence refers to him as “the master”. Szabó's own husband, Tibor Szobotka, was an author too. He died in 1982. Emerence forecasts his early death in the book.

Magda Szabó won all the chief Hungarian literary prizes as well as the French Prix Femina Étranger for the French translation of The Door. The English translation was shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her books have been translated into 42 languages.

Szabó herself thought her best loved book would remain Für Elise, her memoirs. Like so much of her remarkable work, it has not been translated into English.

Magda Szabó, poet, dramatist, essayist and novelist, was born on October 5, 1917. She died on November 19, 2007, aged 90