The Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz yesterday won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize for works the judges said portrayed the Nazi death camp as "the ultimate truth" about man's inhumanity to man.

The 72-year-old was at a loss for words when told he had become his country's first ever Nobel laureate for Literature: "I felt a mixture of surprise and joy. Then I didn't know what to say," he said in Berlin, where he is researching a new book.

Clutching a bunch of red flowers with his wife, Magda, sitting beside him Mr Kertesz said: "This should bring something to the countries in eastern Europe."

The Swedish Academy said that Mr Kertesz won the prize "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

Hungary's literary world applauded too, but to most of his countrymen, Mr Kertesz remains a stranger. He has never achieved anything like bestseller status in his native country where the subject of the Holocaust remains a poorly explored subject. "I did not have trouble publishing in Hungary, but the problems I had were rather with the reception my books got in Hungarian society," he commented acidly yesterday.

"There is no awareness of the Holocaust in Hungary. People have not faced up to the Holocaust. I hope in the light of this recognition, they will face up to it more than until now."

His Hungarian literary colleagues were generous in their praise: "This is a great thing for Hungarian literature," said Mihaly Szegedy Maszak, Professor of Comparative Literature in Budapest, and Indiana Universities. "It is the first time a Hungarian writer has received a Nobel Prize. Lots of Hungarian scientists, yes, but not writers."

Kertesz's first book, Fateless, about a 14-year-old boy taken to a concentration camp who conforms and survives, written between 1960 and 1973, was initially rejected by publishers.

The books suffered by being poorly translated into English said Professor Szegedy Maszak: 'The language, the irony, an almost humorous irony does not come through. Something is missing."

The writer and playwright Gyorgy Spiro – who, like Kertesz is Jewish, put the writer in the same category as some of the best-known writers about the Holocaust.

"'Fateless, is one of the few pieces of great writing about the Holocaust and ranks along with the work of Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi. It's about human nature."