Since 1988 he was President of the Hungarian Romani Cultural Association (Magyarországi Cigányok Kulturális Szövetsége).[2]
His most famous book, Füstös képek ("Images in Smoke", translated in English as The Color of Smoke) is a novel based on personal experience, set in
World War II. It is a bildungsroman[3] that shows life in a Roma village in Northeast Hungary, from 1940 until the German occupation of the country in 1944 when
Roma people were put into death camps. While filled with amusing anecdotes, with a petty criminal subplot, and adolescent eroticism, it portrays dehumanization of Romani in the society.[4][5]
There is the Lakatos Menyhért School in
Budapest.[6]
Books
1975: Füstös képek
Bulgarian: Окадени картини, 1977
German: Bitterer Rauch. Verlag Volk und Welt. Berlin 1978 (
ISBN9783421018335), 1979, 1980, 1982
French: Couleur de fumée : une épopée tzigane, Paris, Actes Sud, 1986.
English: The Color of Smoke: An Epic Novel of the Roma, 2015,
ISBN0985062347
1975: Angárka és Busladarfi
1979: A hét szakállas farkas
1979: A paramisák ivadékai
1981: Az öreg fazék titka
1981: Csandra szekere
German: Csandras Karren. Zigeunergeschichten. Volk und Welt, Berlin 1984