Imre Kertész

Imre Kertész was born in Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family; his parents separated when he was a small child and he was sent to boarding school. In 1944, aged fourteen, he was deported with other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and from there to Buchenwald. He survived and returned to Budapest in 1945. After school he worked as a journalist until the paper he wrote for adopted the Communist line in 1951, then in a factory and a ministry press office. From 1953 he worked as a freelance journalist and translator, rendering into Hungarian German-language authors such as Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Canetti.

Between 1969 and 1973 he wrote Fatelessness, the account of a fifteen-year-old boy, György Köves, carried through the camps. Its narrator registers each stage with an unsettling, uncomprehending matter-of-factness that refuses tragic meaning. Rejected at first by the state publishers, the novel finally appeared in 1975. Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child, in which a man explains why he will not father a child after Auschwitz, complete a loose trilogy; Liquidation follows the survivors of a writer’s suicide in post-Communist Budapest.

Recognition came first in Germany, after the fall of Communism. Kertész was the first Hungarian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote the screenplay for the film of Fatelessness, released in 2005, lived for many years in Berlin, and remained a contested figure in Hungary. He died in Budapest in 2016.