Dossier K

Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary on November 9, 1929. He was only 14 years old when he was deported with 7,000 other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944. He survived that camp and later was transferred to the Buchenwald camp from where he was liberated in 1945. After returning to his native Budapest, he worked as a journalist and translator. He translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti into Hungarian.

He wrote several novels that drew largely from his experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. His novels included Fateless, Fiasco, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, Someone Else, The K File, Europe's Depressing Heritage, and Liquidation. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Fateless in 2005. While his work was ignored by both the communist authorities and the public in Hungary where awareness of the Holocaust remained negligible, his work was recognized in other parts of the world. He received awards including the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1995, The Book Prize for European Understanding, the Darmstadt Academy Prize in 1997, the World Literature Prize in 2000, and the Nobel Prize for Literature for fiction in 2002. He died after a long illness on March 31, 2016 at the age of 86.

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