Imre Kertész (Hungarian: [ˈimrɛ ˈkɛrteːs]; born 9 November 1929) is a Hungarian author of Jewish descent, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". Born in Budapest, Hungary, he resides in Berlin with his wife.

Background
During World War II, Kertész was deported at the age of 14 with other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later sent to Buchenwald.
His best-known work, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), describes the experience of 15-year-old György (George) Köves in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. Some have interpreted the book as quasi-autobiographical, but the author disavows a strong biographical connection. In 2005, a film based on the novel, for which he wrote the script, was made in Hungary.[3] Although sharing the same title, the film is more autobiographical than the book: it was released internationally at various dates in 2005 and 2006.
Kertész's writings translated into English include Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért) and Liquidation (Felszámolás). Kertész initially found little appreciation for his writing in Hungary and moved to Germany. Kertész started translating German works into Hungarian[ — such as The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, the plays of Dürrenmatt, Schnitzler and Tankred Dorst, the thoughts of Wittgenstein — and he did not publish another novel until the late 1980s.[3] He continues to write in Hungarian and submits his works to publishers in Hungary.
He criticized Steven Spielberg's depiction of the Holocaust in his 1993 film Schindler's List as kitsch, saying: "I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life and the very possibility of the Holocaust

Hungarian novelist, essayist, and translator, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. In his semiautobiographical novels Kertész has analyzed the experience of the individual during barbaric times, especially exemplified in the Holocaust. Kertész early prose exhibit existentialist traits but his works are difficult to classify within any stylistic trend.
"Auschwitz must have been hanging in the air for a long, long time, centuries, perhaps like a dark fruit slowly ripening in the sparkling rays of innumerable ignominious deeds, waiting to finally drop on one's head." (in Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1990)
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest into a family of Jewish descent. According to an anectote, he received at the age of ten a diary as a birthday present, but its white pages scared him. In his youth Kertész experienced the horrors of the Nazi system. Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 and began exterminating Jews and Gypsies. Kertész was deported together with 7,000 Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. There he spent a few days and was then transferred to Buchenwald and Zeitz. "I am a nonbelieving Jew", Kertész has said in an interview. "Yet as a Jew I was taken to Auschwitz." In the factory of death Kertész suddenly realized that he could be killed anywhere at any time. This existentialist moment became crucial for him as a writer.
In 1945 Kertész was liberated by the Allied forces. After returning to Hungary, he was employed as a journalist by Világosság, a Budapest newspaper. When the newspaper adopted orthodox Communist ideology, Kertész was dismissed. For a while he worked in a factory. Between 1951 and 1953 Kertész served in the army, and then devoted himself entirely to writing.