2002 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Imre Kertész. The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on 10 October 2002.

The citation

The citation reads: "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

The laureate

Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest, Hungary.

Why it matters

Kertész survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager, and his novel Fatelessness draws on that experience. He is the first Hungarian writer to receive the prize.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.