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Hungarian officials mourn Nobel Prize winning author Imre Kertesz

Xinhua, April 1, 2016 Adjust font size:

Hungarian President Janos Ader sent a letter of sympathy to the family of Imre Kertesz, the only Hungarian who has won a Nobel Prize in Literature after his death on Thursday at the age of 86.

"We should all be grateful for his bravery and consistent honesty," Ader wrote, stating that Kertesz's life was a gift to all who loved him, read his books and understood him.

Kertesz saw the nature of dictatorship, the "era of irrationality," with an unparalleled keenness and accuracy, said Ader. He taught people that nothing of the agonizing past should be forgotten because it is a part of common fate, he added.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is currently in Washington, described Kertesz's work, saying that when reading his novels, all of humankind gets to see its own fate through a different prism.

His world renowned work shows that no tyranny can overcome the human will to live and to live in freedom, Orban said a letter to the family of Kertesz.

Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos called Kertesz's death "an irreplaceable loss to Hungarian culture," and announced that the city would arrange his funeral.

The Association of Hungarian Book Publishers and Distributors issued a statement calling Kertesz's works everlasting and indisputable treasures of universal literature, and important gauges of the self-awareness of a nation. European intellectual life and all of Hungarian literature has suffered an irreplaceable loss with his death, it stated.

Kertesz was granted the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature for, in the words of the Nobel Committee, "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 the age of 14 in 1944, and eventually sent to Buchenwald. His first novel "Fatelessness" (Sortalansag in Hungarian), tells the story of a 15-year-old boy in these concentration camps, based on that experience.

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