Hungarian Nobel literature laureate Imre Kertesz dies at 86

Imre Kertesz, the only Hungarian who had won a Nobel Prize in Literature, died here on Thursday morning at 86, his publisher Magveto notified local wire service MTI.

Kertesz was granted the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

Kertesz, who was Jewish, was deported to the Auschwitz German concentration camp at 14 in 1944, and eventually sent to Buchenwald in eastern Germany. Based on that experience, he wrote the novel "Fateless" (Sortalansag in Hungarian), which tells the story of a 15-year-old boy in the concentration camp.

His best-known works also include "Kaddish for a Child Not Born" and

"Liquidation."

"Fateless" was first published in Hungary in 1975. Kertesz was reworking a journal running from 1991 to 2001 into book form at the time of his death, whose cause was stated only as a "lengthy, serious illness." Endi