Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz has won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize for works the judges said brought home to ordinary readers the reality of life in Nazi death camps.
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Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz smiles after being awarded the Nobel Literature Prize in Berlin. Photo: Reuters
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Kertesz (72) won the $1 million prize for writing that upholds the experience of the individual in the face of a barbaric and arbitrary history, the Swedish Academy said.
As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a Hungarian writer living under communist rule in his country, Kertesz experienced directly some of the most acute suffering of the 20th century.
Kertesz, conducting research for a new book in Berlin, told reporters the award was a happy surprise and should be a boost for writers from the former Soviet bloc.
"It was a mixture of surprise and joy," he said. "This should bring something to the countries in Eastern Europe."
In his work, Kertesz returns repeatedly to the experience of Auschwitz, the camp in German-occupied Poland where over one million Jews and other victims of the Nazis died.
"He is one of the few people who manages to describe that in a way which is immediately accessible to us, who have not shared that experience," said Mr Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the academy.
Kertesz does not see himself as a Jew in religious terms, but has said: "When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz."
Kertesz's first novel, "Fateless", about a man taken to a concentration camp who conforms and survives, was initially rejected.
The novel, which takes the reality of camp life for granted, derives its force from the absence of indignation and protest.