Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai awarded Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
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Summarized by AI; it may make mistakes. Check important info
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 has been conferred to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
The announcement was made by the Nobel committee at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. A similar remote rural area is the scene of Krasznahorkai’s first novel, Sátántangó, published in 1985 (Satantango, 2012), which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work.
About the novel
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. Silence and anticipation reign until the charismatic Irimiás and his crony Petrina, who were believed by all to be dead, suddenly appear on the scene. To the waiting residents, they seem as messengers either of hope or of the last judgement. The satanic element referred to in the title of the book is present in their slave morality and in the pretences of the trickster Irimiás, which, effective as they are, are deceitful, leaving almost all of them tied up in knots.
Everyone in the novel is waiting for a miracle to happen, a hope that is from the very outset punctured by the book’s introductory Kafka motto: ‘In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.’ The novel was made into a highly original 1994 film in collaboration with the director Béla Tarr.
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 (1989; The Melancholy of Resistance, 1998).
His other notable works include: Háború és háború (1999; War & War, 2006), Báró Wenckheim hazatér (2016; Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, 2019), and Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bach- regénye (2021; Herscht 07769: A Novel, 2024).
