Holocaust writer wins Nobel Prize

This year's Nobel Prize for literature has been won by Hungarian author and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz, whose autobiographical novels explore how individuals can survive when subjected to "barbaric" social forces.

Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 15, and was finally liberated from Buchenwald in 1945.

After working as a journalist on a Hungarian daily newspaper, he was dismissed after the communist takeover and conscripted into the army for two years. He began to write from his "voluntary prison cell" - a one-room flat in Budapest he shared with his wife - for the next 35 years, supporting himself as a freelance translator of German literature.

His first book, Sorstalansag (Fateless), appeared in a limited edition in 1975 after being rejected by a state publishing company and tells of the deportation of a teenager to Auschwitz.

It forms the first part of his "trilogy of those without a destiny", in which Kertesz traces his past. Sorstalansag was singled out for praise by the Swedish Academy, the 216-year-old body of 18 lifetime members which makes the annual award, worth $1m.

"For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence," the Swedish Academy said. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience."

"The refusal to compromise in Kertesz's stance can be perceived clearly in his style, which is reminiscent of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for unsuspecting visitors."

Kertesz's second novel, Fiasco (1988), features a hero who is a journalist, and the third, Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1992), is based around the idea of the Jewish prayer for the dead - the kaddish. Kertesz has described his kaddish as being for the child he refuses to bring into a world which permitted the existence of Auschwitz.

Kertesz's Nobel win is the latest in a series of honours for the author. He was awarded the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1995, The Book Prize for European Understanding, Leipzig 1997, the Darmstadt Academy Prize in 1997, the Order "pour le mérite" and the World Literature Prize for 2000.