Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins Nobel Prize in Literature

• The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 is awarded to the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

• He is the second Hungarian to win the prize after Imre Kertesz in 2002.

• Since its inception, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee has awarded the literature prize 118 times. 

• Last year’s honour went to South Korean author Han Kang.

Author of ‘apocalyptic’ epics

• Laszlo Krasznahorkai was born on January 5, 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. 

• A similar remote rural area is the scene of his first novel ‘Satantango’, published in 1985, which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work. 

• The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism. 

• The novel was made into a film in collaboration with the director Bela Tarr in 1994.

• The American critic Susan Sontag soon crowned Krasznahorkai contemporary literature’s ‘master of the apocalypse’, a judgement she arrived at after having read the author’s second book ‘Az ellenállás melankóliája’ (The Melancholy of Resistance, 1989).

• His other work that can be added to ‘apocalyptic’ epics is ‘Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bach-regénye’, which is set in a contemporary small town in Thuringen, Germany. ‘Herscht 07769’ has been described as a great contemporary German novel, on account of its accuracy in portraying the country’s social unrest.

• Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess. 

• But, he looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone. The result is a string of works inspired by the deep-seated impressions left by his journeys to China and Japan. 

• About the search for a secret garden, his 2003 novel ‘Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó’ (A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East) is a mysterious tale with powerful lyrical sections that takes place southeast of Kyoto. 

• The work has the sense of a prelude to the ‘Seiobo járt odalent’ (Seiobo There Below), a collection of 17 stories arranged in a Fibonacci sequence about the role of beauty and artistic creation in a world of blindness and impermanence.

• The common thread running through the book is the Japanese myth concerning Seiobo, who according to legend protects the garden which, every 3,000 years, produces fruit that grants immortality. 

• Another captivating work is ‘Aprómunka egy palotáért: bejárás mások őrületébe’ (Spadework for a Palace: Entering the Madness of Others) published in 2018. This extremely entertaining and rather madcap tale takes place in a Manhattan haunted by the ghosts of the great Herman Melville, who once lived there, and his fanatic admirers.