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Biography
Hungarian

Imre Kertész

1929 — 2016

Imre Kertész was a Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 — the first Hungarian to receive the prize. Fatelessness (1975) — a novel about a fifteen-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy's deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, narrated with a deliberate, disturbing absence of moral judgment — is one of the most important works of Holocaust literature. It took Kertész thirteen years to write and was initially ignored in Communist Hungary.

Past sales0
PeriodMid-Century
NationalityHungarian
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) was born on 9 November 1929 in Budapest, Hungary. At fourteen, he was deported to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. He returned to Budapest and worked as a journalist before turning to fiction and translation. He translated Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Canetti into Hungarian.

Life and Career

Sorstalanság (1975, Fatelessness) — narrated by György Köves, a fifteen-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy who is deported first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald — was his masterwork. The novel’s radical achievement is its narrative voice: Köves observes the camps with a naive, almost accommodating acceptance, finding moments of happiness and adapting to atrocity as if it were merely another version of everyday life. This refusal to impose retrospective moral judgment makes the horror more devastating, not less.

The novel was published to silence in Communist Hungary and took decades to gain recognition. Fiasco (1988) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) — a monologue by a Holocaust survivor explaining why he will not bring a child into the world — formed a loose trilogy.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

He died on 31 March 2016 in Budapest.

Key Works

  • Fatelessness (1975)
  • Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990)
  • Liquidation (2003)

Collecting Kertész

Hungarian firsts (Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó) are rare. Fatelessness (2004, Knopf, English translation by Tim Wilkinson) brings $15–$30.