Ágota Kristóf

Ágota Kristóf (Csikvánd, 30 October 1935 – Neuchâtel, 27 July 2011) was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French, a language she learned as an adult. Her case is striking: she moved from her mother tongue to the language of her exile and built with it one of the most widely read narrative works in late twentieth-century European literature.

She was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, into a family of teachers: her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a professor of arts. At twenty-one she had to leave the country after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was crushed by Soviet forces. She fled with her husband, who had once been her history teacher, and their four-month-old daughter, reaching Neuchâtel. The following five years were marked by loneliness and factory work at a watch manufacturer. When she quit the job and separated from her husband, she began studying French and writing in it, a language she always experienced as both a tool and foreign ground.

Her first works were poetry and plays, such as John et Joe and Un rat qui passe, but prose brought her recognition. Her novel The Notebook, published in 1986, opened a trilogy completed by The Proof and The Third Lie. The trilogy's main themes include war and destruction, love and loneliness, desire and loss, and the uncertain line between truth and fiction. Her style is spare, direct and deliberately free of ornament, which explains much of its impact. The Notebook was translated into more than forty languages and won the European Prize for French Literature.

Her later output includes the novel Yesterday (1995), a collection of short stories, several plays, and the autobiographical The Illiterate (2004), which traces her childhood reading, her time in a boarding school and her flight through Austria to Switzerland. Most of her books were published by Éditions du Seuil in Paris. She received numerous awards, among them the Gottfried Keller Prize in 2001 and the Kossuth Prize of the Hungarian state in 2011.

Her papers are held in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. Kristóf is remembered as a writer who turned an adopted language into a means of bearing witness to exile, the violence of the twentieth century and personal memory.