?Fateless? premiered in the UK two weeks earlier, at London?s Imperial War Museum. The film?s distributor in the UK is Dogwoof Pictures, which specialises in independent productions.
Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature, made a rare visit it London in March to speak as part of the Jewish Book Week. Katalin Bogyay, director of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London invited Kertész to visit the city in 2002, but he said he would accept the invitation only if ?Fatelessness? was translated again and reissued by a prestigious publishing house. In August 2005, the novel, which is based on Kertész?s own experience as a child growing up during the Holocaust, was published by the UK?s Harwill Press in a prize-winning translation by Tim Wilkinson.
Since his visit, several of the UK?s most important newspapers, including The Times and The Guardian, have published interviews with the author and written about his work. In the interview with The Guardian?s Julians Evans, Kertész described the impetus for ?Fateless? in light of his task as a writer:
?What writers can do in this symbolic ice age is to preserve and present individual identities, individual existences that you can pick out from the flow and present as something that moves people, or shocks them?.[I wanted] to write a scandalous book, a scandalous piece of text, something that had never been written about before."
The Guardian also named ?Fateless? its ?Film of the Week? on Friday.
The film adaptation of ?Fateless?, which is the most expensive Hungarian production ever, premiered in Hungary last year and has been awarded prizes at film festivals around the world.
?Fateless? is not the only great Hungarian literature UK audiences are being exposed to: a stage adaptation of Hungarian author Sándor Márai?s novel ?Embers? has played to much acclaim at London?s Duke of York Theatre for several months, and its run has been extended until June 24.
To access the interview with Kertész in The Times, visit http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14931-2152598,00.html
For the article in The Guardian, visit http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1758530,00.html
