KERTÉSZ, IMRE

KERTÉSZ, IMRE (1929– ), Hungarian novelist and translator. Kertész was born in Budapest and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. In postwar Budapest he worked as a journalist and translator, publishing his first novel in 1975. Sorstalanság (Fateless, 1992), deals with his experience as a teenager in Auschwitz, as does his Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (1990; Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1997), which shares much of Primo Levi's pessimism regarding the human condition and explores the dubious blessing of survival and the price paid for that survival. In 2003 he published Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2004), a novel about a Holocaust survivor with echoes of Kafka and Beckett. His collected lectures and essays include A holocaust mint kultúra ("The Holocaust as Culture," 1993). In 2002, Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." The citation read: "In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete…. For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence."