Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday for what the Swedish Academy described as his "compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." The Academy called him "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 there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone."
Born in 1954, Krasznahorkai published Satantango, his first novel, in 1985, "a literary sensation in Hungary and the author's breakthrough work," the Academy wrote. "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."
Among his other titles is The Melancholy of Resistance (1998), "a feverish horror fantasy played out in a small Hungarian town nestled in a Carpathian valley." In War & War (2006) Krasznahorkai "shifts his attention beyond the borders of his Hungarian homeland in allowing the humble archivist Korin to decide, as his life's final act, to travel from the outskirts of Budapest to New York."
In Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019), "Dostoyevsky's idiot is reincarnated in the hopelessly infatuated baron with his gambling addiction. Now ruined, he is on his way home to Hungary having spent many years living in exile in Argentina." Herscht 07769: A Novel (2024) offers "a credible portrayal of a contemporary small town in Thüringen, Germany, which is nevertheless also afflicted by social anarchy, murder and arson."
Krasznahorkai won the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement. He also won two successive Best Translated Book Awards, in 2013 and 2014, for Satantango and Seiobo There Below, a short story collection, respectively. His books are published in the U.S. by New Directions.
