Hungarian wins Nobel literature prize

Hungarian Imre Kertesz won the Nobel Prize in literature today for writing that “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

Kertesz, who was incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz as a teenager, wrote about people being subjected to social forces.

The Swedish Academy singled out his first novel in 1975 Sorstalansag, (Fateless) in which he writes about a young man who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives.

“For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence,” the academy said. “It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience.”

The announcement was made in the Swedish capital Stockholm.

Kertesz, who was born in Budapest on November 9, 1929, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, then to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945.

“The refusal to compromise in Kertesz’s stance can be perceived clearly in his style, which is reminiscent of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for unsuspecting visitors,” the academy said. The award is worth £650,000.

The 18 lifetime members of the 216-year-old Swedish Academy make the annual selection in deep secrecy at one of their weekly meetings and do not even reveal the date of the announcement until two days beforehand.

Nominees are not revealed publicly for 50 years, leaving the literary world only to guess about who was in the running.

However, many of the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list every year.

Last year’s award went to perennial favourite VS Naipaul, a novelist and essayist born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent.

A week of Nobel Prizes started on Monday with the medicine award, followed on Tuesday by physics and yesterday by chemistry and economics.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named tomorrow in Oslo, Norway, the only Nobel not awarded in Sweden.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, specified in his will endowing the awards that nationality should not be a consideration, but many believe the Swedish Academy tries to spread the honour over different geographical areas.

Nobel otherwise gave only vague guidance about the prize, saying that it should go to those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” and “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

The prizes always are presented on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.