STOCKHOLM, Oct 10: Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday for works the judges said portrayed the Nazi death camp as “the ultimate truth” about how low man could fall.

Kertesz, 72, won the one million dollars prize for writing that upholds the experience of the individual in the face of a barbaric and arbitrary history, the Swedish Academy said.

As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a Hungarian writer living under communist rule, Kertesz experienced directly some of the most acute suffering of the 20th century.

Kertesz, conducting research in Berlin for a new book about a woman who lives through the post-war period and the fall of the Iron Curtain after her parents experience the Holocaust, told reporters the award was a happy surprise.

“This should bring something to the countries in eastern Europe,” he said, clutching a bunch of red flowers with his wife, Magda, sitting at his side.

“I hope there’ll be more light shone on the somewhat ignored literature of Hungary... Perhaps a few more people will learn Hungarian and translate the works,” he added.

Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertesz was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz in 1944, and from there to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in 1945.

He returned to Hungary and worked as a journalist, but lost his job in 1951 when his paper adopted the communist party line.

After that he supported himself as an independent writer and translator. He was able to make more public appearances after communist rule ended in 1989, and his lectures and essays have been collected in three volumes, besides his four novels, fictionalised diaries and stories.

In his work, Kertesz returns repeatedly to the experience of Auschwitz, the camp in German-occupied Poland where over one million Jews and other victims of the Nazis died.

“He is one of the few people who manages to describe that in a way which is immediately accessible to us, who have not shared that experience,” said Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the academy.—Reuters