Literature · Film · Media · 1929–2016
Born: 9 November 1929 · Died: 31 March 2016 · Age: 86
Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author and Holocaust survivor
Did you know?His most famous work, Fatelessness, was based on his own experiences as a teenager in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Imre Kertész was 14 when he was deported to Auschwitz. Decades later he wrote about it in a way no one expected. The narrator of Fatelessness describes the camps with a teenager's flat, puzzled calm. That makes the horror more disturbing. The book was largely ignored in communist Hungary. After the Nobel Prize, it found readers everywhere. He spent his life examining how people adapt to the unthinkable. He saw the Holocaust as a warning about the modern world.
Imre Kertész (Hungarian:; 9 November 1929 – 31 March 2016) was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature.
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Profile
Hungarian writer, born 1929
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest on 9 November 1929.
He survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager.
He wrote Fatelessness about a boy in the camps.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
Career highlights
Did you know?Fatelessness took him about 13 years to write.
Questions people ask
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