Juhász was born in Budapest (1928) and was awarded the highest prize in Hungarian literature. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature explains the background to his work:

A new phase in Hungarian cultural policy was ushered in by the so-called Lukács controversy in which Lukács was castigated by Communist Party spokesmen for preferring “Western” critical realism to (Soviet) socialist realism. Although the era of enforced socialist realism was relatively short (1948-53), its adverse effects could be felt for years afterwards, and only since the early 1960s can one speak of a genuine pluralism in the cultural policy of the government. Nevertheless it was in the early 1950s that a new constellation of poetic talents emerged. These were poets of peasant origin -Ferenc Juhász, László Nagy, István Simon, Imre Takáics, and Sándor Czóri—-who soon left behind their primitive realism or initial naive romanticism. These writers, especially Juhász and Nagy, created a syncretic imaginative style that grappled first with problems of the small community and later with those of a chaotic yet interdependent world. (“Hungarian Literature”)