Imre Kertész

Deported from Budapest to Auschwitz at fourteen in 1944, Kertész survived subsequent transport to Buchenwald and a satellite labor camp before returning home in 1945 to find much of his family gone. He worked as a journalist until 1951, when the newspaper was purged and realigned to strict Party doctrine and he lost his job, followed by a stint in a factory and compulsory military service.

For decades afterward he supported himself as a freelance translator of German-language writers, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein, while spending more than ten years writing Fatelessness in near isolation. Publishers rejected it repeatedly; it finally appeared in 1975 to almost no notice, followed by Kaddish for an Unborn Child, his uncompromising refusal to bring a child into a world that had produced the camps.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, the first Hungarian laureate, and spent his final years battling Parkinson's disease before his death in Budapest in 2016.