Imre Kertész, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2002, is a strong, independent voice in contemporary Hungarian literature. He is also a witness to the Holocaust, having survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His novels and essays fathom the Holocaust from the perspective of European historical, philosophical, and literary traditions. Kertész's dry and unsentimental prose made him controversial. He was one of the first in Soviet-controlled Hungary to write about the taboo subject of the Holocaust in a way that differed from published memoirs. Kertész views the Nazi Holocaust not as an accident or an inconceivable transgression in European history but as a link in the chain of totalitarian regimes, supported by the education and views of generations of erudite Europeans.

Kertész was born on 9 November 1929 in Budapest in an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family. His father was a...