Ferenc Karinthy was a novelist, playwright, journalist, editor and translator, as well as a water polo champion. He wrote more than a dozen novels. Epepe ("Metropole") and Budapesti Tavasz ("Spring Comes to Budapest") have been translated into English, as have two of his plays.

Karinthy worked as a script editor for Nemzeti Színház and Madách Theatre, as well as theatres in Miskolc, Szeged and Debrecen. Between 1957 and 1960, Karinthy translated a number of writers into Hungarian including Machiavelli and Molière. He won a number of awards for his own writing including the Baumgarten Prize, the József Attila Prize and the Kossuth Prize.