Stockholm: Hungarian Holocaust survivor and novelist Imre Kertesz, whose writing is dominated by his experiences in Nazi concentration camps as a teenager, won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize on October 10.

Little-read in the English-speaking world, his work has found the most resonance in Germany, which gave Kertesz a gateway from his native Hungary to a large audience.

"My mother tongue is a little island language but the Nobel Prize is also a distinction for Hungarian literature," he said, after learning of the jury's decision.

Kertesz, at 72 the first Hungarian to win the prize, has centred his work on his experience in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where he was held in 1944 and 1945. "When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz," he once said.

Refusing to see concentration camps as an accident in Western European history, he instead called them "the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence".

The Swedish Academy said his work described "the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

After the war, he worked for a Budapest newspaper, was sacked in 1951 when the Communist party took control, and completed two years of military service before becoming a full-time writer, including of musicals and light theatre. He also translated authors such as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Roth, Wittgenstein and Canetti, who all influenced his own writing.