Oliver Mark · CC BY-SA 4.0

Imre Kertész survived German concentration and death camps as a teenager, and spent the rest of his writing life working through what that meant, in novels that dealt directly with the Holocaust, dictatorship, and personal freedom rather than treating them as a chapter safely closed. He was the first Hungarian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."