Imre Kertész

Born on November 9, 1929, in Budapest, Imre Kertész was fourteen years old when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944. He was deported to Auschwitz, where he claimed to be sixteen, a lie that saved him from immediate extermination by redirecting him to a labor detail. He was subsequently transferred to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. He returned to Budapest, worked briefly as a journalist for the newspaper Világosság, and was dismissed in 1951 when the paper adopted the Communist party line. After two years of military service he became an independent writer and translator, rendering into Hungarian the works of Nietzsche, Freud, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Wittgenstein, and Canetti, writers whose influence pervades his own prose. His first novel, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), written over more than a decade, was rejected by publishers before finally appearing in 1975 to near-total silence. The book recounts a teenage boy's experience of the camps in a deliberately flat, affectless voice that refuses the consolations of heroism or redemption. Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) and Liquidation (2003) extended the trilogy's meditation on survival and its aftermath under totalitarian regimes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, the first Hungarian to receive it, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." He died in Budapest on March 31, 2016, at the age of eighty-six.