Ágota Kristóf

Hungarian-Swiss · 1935 to 2011

Born Ágota Kristóf on 30 October 1935 in the Hungarian village of Csikvánd, she was the daughter of Kálmán Kristóf, an elementary school teacher, and Antónia Turchányi, who taught arts and crafts. The family moved to the town of Kőszeg in 1944, and she went on to earn a science baccalaureate in Szombathely in 1954, the same year she married Janos Béri, a former history teacher of hers. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in the autumn of 1956, the couple fled the country on 27 November with their four-month-old daughter, Zsuzsanna, trekking through forest to the Austrian border under cover of darkness before reaching, by way of Vienna, the French-speaking Swiss town of Neuchâtel. For five years she worked an assembly line in a watch-parts factory in nearby Fontainemelon, unable to speak the language around her, composing verse silently in Hungarian to the rhythm of the machines. In the early 1960s she left both the factory and the marriage, and set about learning French in earnest, a language she would later call her "enemy" for how completely it displaced her mother tongue. Her 1986 debut novel, Le Grand Cahier, following twin brothers who train themselves to feel nothing and write only what they can verify, won the Prix européen de l'ADELF and opened what became the Notebook Trilogy, completed by La Preuve (1988) and Le Troisième Mensonge (1991). She later remarried, had two more children, and published the novel Hier (1995) and the autobiographical L'Analphabète (2004), winning Switzerland's Gottfried Keller Prize in 2001 and Austria's State Prize for European Literature in 2008. She died at home in Neuchâtel on 27 July 2011, at seventy-five; her ashes were carried back to Kőszeg, the Hungarian town of her school years, for burial.