Ágota Kristóf

Hungarian Swiss writer, poet, novelist and playwright (1935–2011)

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Fame54.7
Momentum0.0
Global rank#147
Writers rank#25
Wikipedia8.1K

Lived 1935–2011, aged 76

WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
45 languages
Cross-language footprint
Global rank
#147
Fame.am leaderboard
Era
1935–2011
Aged 76
Known for
The Notebook
2013

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

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.

Biography

About

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…

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