Hungarian Imre Kertesz, whose novels often focused on his time in a Nazi concentration camp, won the Nobel Prize in literature yesterday for exploring how individuals can survive when subjected to "barbaric" social forces.
Kertesz, 72, who was born in Budapest, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, then to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945.
"For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence," the Swe-dish Academy said. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience."
The award is worth 10 million kronor (US$1 million).
The citation singled out his first novel in 1975 Sorstalansag, (Fateless) in which he writes about a young man who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives.
"The refusal to compromise in Kertesz's stance can be perceived clearly in his style, which is reminiscent of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for unsuspecting visitors," the academy said.
Kertesz said yesterday he was surprised and happy to have won the prize and that it should be help writers from eastern Europe.
"It was a mixture of surprise and joy," Kertesz told reporters at the Ernst Reuter Scientific Institute in Berlin, where he is doing research and writing a new book.
"This should bring something to the countries in eastern Europe," he said.
The 18 lifetime members of the 216-year-old Swedish Academy make the annual selection in deep secrecy at one of their weekly meetings and do not even reveal the date of the announcement until two days beforehand.
Nominees are not revealed publicly for 50 years, leaving the literary world to only guess about who was in the running. However, many of the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list every year.
Last year's award went to perennial favorite V.S. Naipaul, a British novelist and essayist born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named today in Oslo, Norway, the only Nobel not awarded in Sweden.
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