Tim Wilkinson obituary

My friend Tim Wilkinson, who has died aged 73, was a translator of Hungarian literature into English, notably of the work of the Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, and that of Miklós Szentkuthy.

In a 15-year burst of activity from the turn of the century he translated nine volumes by Kertész, two of which remain in manuscript, as well as works by such contemporaries as György Spiró, Iván Sándor and Miklós Mészöly, and also contributed dozens of shorter pieces, criticism as well as translations, to magazines. A further dozen full-length works remain unpublished, including two by the Man Booker international prize-winning László Krasznahorkai. He devoted his final active years to the demanding philosophical oeuvre of the modernist Szentkuthy, of which five volumes have appeared.

Tim was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, and grew up in Sheffield, the son of Peter Wilkinson, a lecturer in geology at the University of Sheffield, and Éva Lukács-Popper, born in Bratislava, and a scientific information officer for British Steel in Sheffield. Tim went to King Edward VII school in Sheffield, and in 1965 to the University of Liverpool to study biochemistry. He subsequently worked for the pharmaceutical firm Roche, in Switzerland and Holland.

He first visited Hungary in 1964 to see his grandmother, the sister of the Marxist philosopher and writer György Lukács. In 1970 he moved to Budapest to work at the Central Institute for Physics as reviser of their English-language publications. During this time he learnt Hungarian, “on the hoof” as he put it. He honed his translating skills on non-fiction, particularly major works that provided him with an invaluable grounding in Hungarian history, but focused increasingly on fiction.

Tim was particularly close to Kertész, the first Hungarian winner, in 2002, of the Nobel Prize for literature. Incensed at an inadequate American version of Kertész’s semi-autobiographical account of a teenager’s survival in the concentration camps, Tim re-translated it as Fatelessness (2005). This won the PEN America translation prize in 2005, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate literary prize in 2006, and was runner-up for the Independent foreign fiction prize, also in 2006.

Tim invariably translated for himself and not to order, hoping that publishers realised that the high quality of his choice of Hungarian works would enliven what he saw as the mostly tepid literary landscape of Britain and the US. He was particularly well-read in English and German and never reluctant to share his strong but always cogent views on literature, translation, or indeed any other topic.

For almost 50 years he was happily married to the ethnomusicologist Irén Kertész, who cared for him selflessly throughout his long final illness. She survives him, as do his brothers, Nicholas and Colin.