Imre Kertész writes both novels, plays and stories and also musicals and comedies. Because of his Jewish descent, he was sent as a fifteen-year old to Auschwitz and then on to Buchenwald. He described his experiences there in »Fatelessness«, which was turned into a film by Lajos Koltai in 2005.
His writing, which describes the delicate lot of the individual in the face of the barbaric capriciousness of history, won him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, making him to date the only Hungarian to have received this honour.
Kertész has received numerous other prizes apart from the Nobel; in 1995 he took the Brandenburg Prize for Literature, in 1997 the Leipzig Book Prize for Promotion of Inter-European Understanding, and in 2000 he garnered the Herder and the World Literature prizes. Kertész also received the Goethe Medal in 2004 and the Ernst Reuter Berlin Badge in 2006.
Imre Kertész has been an honorary doctor of Berlin’s Free University since 2005.
On January 29, 2007, Kertesz was invited to speak in the German Bundestag on the official anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He read from his book »Kaddish for a Child not Born«.
Kertész lives with his wife in Berlin and Budapest.
