The most prestigious awards given for intellectual achievement in the world is the Nobel Prize. They are recognized by virtually every scientist, and they are also among the few prizes known by name to many ordinary citizens. The highlights is a remarkable number of these coveted prizes have been awarded to people of Hungarian background...

Imre Kertész, 78, was born in Budapest. He was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 14 and later to Buchenwald. Kertész finished school in 1948 and became a journalist. He works as a writer and a literary translator and todate, his best known work is ‘Fatelessness’ (in Hungarian Sorstalanság). It is based on his life, describes the experience of fifteen-year-old György (George) Köves in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. Some have interpreted the book as quasi-autobiographical, but the author disavows a strong biographical connection. His writings was translated into English include Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért) and Liquidation (Felszámolás).

Imre Kertész is the first Hungarian Nobel prize winner on literature category. He is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

Today, together with his wife he lives in Berlin.

Here you can read about his Nobel Lecture