Dossier K: A Memoir (21 page)

IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Buchenwald concentration camps. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book,
Fatelessness
, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included
Fiasco
and
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
. Subsequent titles include
Liquidation, Union Jack
, and
The Pathseeker
. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” He lives in Berlin.

TIM WILKINSON is the primary English translator of Imre Kertész (his titles include
Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker
, and
The Union Jack
) as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian literature. His translation of Kertész’s
Fatelessness
was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize.