Ágota Kristóf
Hungarian Swiss writer, poet, novelist and playwright (1935-2011) · Switzerland · On the map · Writers · Died at 75
She left Hungary, learned French as an exile, and wrote a slim, brutal novel - The Notebook - that became one of the most unsettling trilogies in European literature.
Ágota Kristóf is read about 265 times a day, in 45 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 13 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 117 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A life in dates
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About this person
Ágota Kristóf was born in Hungary on 30 October 1935 and later settled in Switzerland, where she took up French and made it her literary language. In 1986 she published Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook), a stark, unflinching work that earned her the European prize from ADELF, the association of Francophone authors. She followed it with two sequels, completing The Notebook Trilogy. Switzerland gave her the Gottfried Keller Award in 2001; Austria gave her its State Prize for European Literature in 2008. She died on 27 July 2011, having written in a borrowed tongue with the precision of someone who knew what exile cost.
