Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mats Malm, the Permanent Secretary at the Swedish Academy said, “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 is awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” The prize culminates a four-decade career marked by haunting prose, philosophical subtlety, and stylistic risk-taking.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary in 1985. He is known for his dystopian, melancholic novels for which he won many awards. He initially made his mark internationally in 1954 with his first novel Satantango, a postmodern masterpiece about the end of the world. Three decades later, in 2015, the novel won The Man Booker International Prize award in English. The novel was subsequently adapted into a seven-hour black-and-white film by his long-time creative partner, director Béla Tarr. Later novels, such as The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), Seiobo There Below (2008), and Herscht 07769 (2021), solidified his position as one of Europe's most difficult and intense literary voices.
Style and the central European epic tradition
The Guardian reported, The Nobel Committee greeted him as "great epic writer in the central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess.” His characteristic long, circuitous sentences, sometimes running pages without a single full stop, catch the beauty and disorder of worlds in dissolution. Krasznahorkai explains his method in simple terms: "Beauty in language. Fun in hell."
Enduring Influence and Literary Philosophy
Critics like Susan Sontag described Krasznahorkai as “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse,” The Guardian says. Despite the complexity of his writing, Krasznahorkai's fiction endures because it engages with the human quest for meaning in the face of collapse. The author says, “If there are readers who haven’t read my books, I couldn’t recommend anything to read to them; instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books."
