Imre Kertész

Imre Kertesz was born in 1929 in Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family. At the age of fourteen, he was deported to Auschwitz and subsequently transferred to Buchenwald and its subcamp Zeitz, where he was liberated in 1945. Returning to Budapest, he worked briefly as a journalist before the Communist regime's cultural strictures pushed him toward literary translation and freelance writing. He spent over a decade writing Fatelessness, drawing on his own experiences but transforming them into something far more complex than memoir. The novel was published in 1975 to near-complete silence in Communist Hungary, where its refusal to frame the Holocaust in politically useful terms made it unwelcome. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Fatelessness.