Imre Kertész. Photo: Wikipedia.

Imre Kertész, the first Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on March 31, 2016, aged 86.

Kertész, the author of The Holocaust as Culture, A Breath-long Silence, While the Fire Squad is Reloading Their Guns and A Language in Exile, lived a remarkable life, having survived not only Nazi camps as a teenager but also the years of Stalinist dictatorship in his homeland immediately after World War II.

“I wrote about the Holocaust because it was a unique experience, I had to live through such a defining experience of the 20th century, and I survived it. But I wrote novels, not Holocaust literature,” Kertész told German newspaper Die Zeit in 2009. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize said had always been particularly interested in “what happens to language and people among totalitarian dictatorships.”

Read full story at The Telegraph.