Péter Kókai was born in 1966 in Zenta/Senta, former Yugoslavia. After completing elementary and secondary school in town, he graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Szabadka/Subotica, with a degree in Marketing.
He began his journalistic career in 1992 at the Újvidék/Novi Sad-based Hungarian-language daily newspaper Magyar Szó (Hungarian Word) as a sports reporter. Two years later, he returned to his home town and started to write about politics, culture, and sports as well. During the 1990s, he wrote for several doemstic and foreign media outlets, including Radio Free Europe and Belgrade-based B92 Radio. For two years he edited the latter’s website in Hungarian.
Péter became Editor-in-Chief of Magyar Szó on October 23, 2002, and led the daily until August 2009 when he voluntarily switched to heading its Marketing Department only. In May 2016 he was expelled by the new leadership and, together with Tibor Purger, founded the Szabad Magyar Szó (Free Hungarian Word) news portal whose mission is to provide for a type of public discourse in which ”every public actor, every political party and civic organization, every institution and every citizen can freely contribute to an open, clean, respectable public debate” witout the fear of repercussions.
Péter is CEO of the Press Freedom Foundation whose mission is identical to the above, only broader in scope. The Foundation’s media family now includes the Szabad Magyar Szó Radio and Családi Kör (Family Circle) weekly magazine, where the latter is the only remaining independent Hungarian printed media in Vajdaság/Vojvodina.
Péter was an elected member of the Hungarian National Minority Council of Serbia in two subsequent mandates, from 2002 to 2010. He has been a member and/or a leader of several civil initiatives and associations, including the Z-11 journalism school. He is a founding member and Co-chair of the Hungarian Movement (Magyar Mozgalom) in Vojvodina.
Péter is married and has two adult children.
