Nobel Prize: Kertesz Awarded Literature Prize
by Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 10/14/2002
Imre Kertesz, a Jewish Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor, has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The author will receive a cash prize of $1 million.
The Swedish Academy cited Kertesz's 1975 debut novel, Fateless, noting that his writing "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." Fateless is the first book in a trilogy of novels about a young man who survives life in a concentration camp.
The 72-year-old Kertesz was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945.
Kertesz is published in English by Northwestern University Press. Acting press director Donna Shear told PW the house has published translations of two of the novels in the trilogy, Fateless and Kaddish for a Child Not Born, and hopes to publish the third novel.
"We're sold out of both books as of this morning," she said. Northwestern is going back to press for both titles for printings "in the tens of thousands. We've already received guarantees from the chains and wholesalers."
