Imre Kertész – resident of Berlin and Budapest and Hungarian citizen – received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2002. The Swedish Academy’s choice came as a surprise to many and in various ways, and the general public as well as critics and scholars were taken unawares. In particular the English-speaking world knew little to nothing about Kertész and his work, and, even today (in 2008), there is only one volume of scholarship on Kertész’s work available in English, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature, edited by Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (Purdue UP, 2005).

Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest into a middle-class secularized Jewish-Hungarian family (Kertész: “it was the Holocaust that made me Je

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First published 10 January 2008

Citation: Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. "Imre Kertész". The Literary Encyclopedia. 10 January 2008.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11921, accessed 9 February 2010.]