Born in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish family, Kertész Imre began his freelance writing career in 1953, working as a translator for a long time, and later also wrote Fate is Uncertain, The Tracer, The English Flag, and The Boatman's Diary, among other works.
Kertész Imre
Biography of Kertész Imre
Kertész Imre (1929-2016) was a Hungarian-Jewish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.
Born in Budapest on November 9, 1929, Kertész Imre was thrown by the Nazis into the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, and rescued in 1945; in 1975, he published his debut novel, Fate is Uncertain, which was set in the camps, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 for this work.
On March 31, 2016, Kertész Imre died at the age of 86 in Budapest.
Kertész Imre's comments
Nobel Prize for Literature citation: 'The themes of his (Kertész's) work return successively to the Auschwitz experience which had a decisive influence on his life.' For Kertész, Auschwitz was not an exceptional event that existed outside Western history. Auschwitz is the most fundamentally true expression of human depravity in the modern way of being." "(The Nobel Prize for Literature) honors his insightful portrayal of the agonizing experiences of vulnerable individuals in their confrontation with powerful and barbaric powers, as well as his distinctive autobiographical literary style."
Yu Zemin: "As a teenager, he was sent to Auschwitz by his 'retarded' motherland; as a young man, he was deprived of his personal destiny by his despotic motherland; in his prime, he experienced repeated refusals of publication and enforced mute; and in his old age, he was fortunate enough to meet with the reforms, but when, as a 'Hungarian writer' was invited to lecture in Germany, his own *** stated that he could not represent his country." "Of the writers who have won the Nobel Prize, he is not the kind of Nobel Prize writer who goes out of favor, but he is a writer who chose right. Because without the Nobel Prize, he would have been ignored, he would have disappeared. That's what the Nobel Prize is all about. It makes sense for the Nobel Prize to pick 10 writers, just to have one like Kertész."