Fatelessness, a novel written in Hungarian, is among the notable works Imre Kertész produced across his career as a writer of fiction.

Kertész was born in Budapest on November 9, 1929, and attended Madách Imre High School. He held both Hungarian and German citizenship and worked across a range of roles throughout his life — as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and translator — writing in both Hungarian and German. His other notable work of fiction, Liquidation, appeared alongside Fatelessness as part of his output as a novelist.

Recognition for his writing came in several forms. Kertész received the Kossuth Prize and the Jeanette Schocken Prize, as well as the Goethe Medal. Then, in 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Hungarian writer to receive that honor. The prize marked a significant moment in his career and in Hungarian literary history.

Kertész died in Budapest on March 31, 2016, in the same city where he had been born eighty-six years earlier. The 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature stands as a concrete measure of the recognition his work received, and it came to a writer who spent his life working across two languages and holding citizenship in two countries. His novel Liquidation remains one of the named works associated with his career as a novelist.