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Looking at the Work of
Imre Kertész
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Varga H. Mária
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Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. And, he was the first Hungarian author to win the accolade as Nobel Laureate. According to the Swedish Academy, he received the prize “for a literary work that captures the survival of the vulnerable experience of the individual in the face of terrible arbitrariness,” highlighting his work “Fatelessness”.
Imre was born into a merchant family. At the age of fourteen, in 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz. And, later to the Buchenwald and then Zeitz labor camps. This trauma is at the heart of Kertész’s writing, and experiences in the camps serve as the basis of both his debut novel “Fatelessness” and his later works.
After the liberation of the camps, he returned to Budapest in 1945. And, there he worked as a journalist and factory worker after finishing his school. But in the mid-fifties, he found his calling and decided to become a novelist. So, it transformed him and began his “internal emigration”. And, he devoted all his time to writing.
Also, he wrote diaries. So, his careful work diaries encompassed his creative activity. These diaries reveal, among other things, that on March 18, 1960, he conceived the draft of his autobiographical novel. The novel was initially titled “Vacation in the Camp”, then “Muslim Work”, and finally published in 1975 with title “Fatelessness”.
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Additionally, his work “The Extermination” is set in a Hungarian. Since, it is about the second generation of the Holocaust so it narrates the consequences of the Holocaust. He hoped that this work will conclude the Holocaust theme. Moreover, the theme accompanied Kertész’s entire oeuvre and has been reflected in his novels like “Fatelessness”, “Failure”, and “Kaddish for the Unborn Child”. Hence, his novels associate him with the literary concept called “witness literature” in which the author describes a trauma from his personal experience.
Although Kertész is proud of the award but regrets that his work is better known in Germany than in Hungary. Nonetheless, he hoped that his Nobel Prize will attract the world’s attention to Hungarian literature and, as well, to those writers who could also have received the award.
Apart from Nobel Prize 2002, he also won the following awards:
- (Budapest, November 9, 1929 – Budapest, March 31, 2016)
- Milan Füst Prize (1983)
- Attila József Prize (1989)
- Tibor Déry Prize (1989)
- Sándor Márai Prize (1996)
- Kossuth Prize (1997)
- Herder Prize (2000)
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Varga H. Mária
János Horvát is a Hungarian poetess and writer. She writes under pen name Varga H. Mária (Varga – her birth name, and that continues as her family name.) She is interested in literature and reading since she was a child. Although her parents were manual workers but they instilled in her love of books. So, after their hard work, and whenever they had some free time, they always had a book in their hands.
Hence, Varga H. Mária says, “Writing is such that when inspiration strikes, you have to put it down on paper immediately. At least the gist of it.” Therefore, her desk is always full of little notes of paper, with lots of topics to write something. Now, she is approaching seventy, and as a pensioner, she has more time for her favorite occupation. So, she tells, “Whether it is morning or night, but in the quiet hours of the evening her Muse is also more willing to guide her pen.”
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