The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai “for his visionary and mesmerizing literary oeuvre which, at the heart of terrifying dread, reaffirms the power of art.”
اضافة اعلان
For over four decades, Krasznahorkai has combined metaphysical awe with a strict, almost ritualistic faith in literary form. His trademark long sentences often stretch across entire pages, making his works resemble revelations emerging from the ruins.
Born in 1954 in the small border town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian frontier, Krasznahorkai studied law in Szeged and Budapest before devoting himself to literature at Eötvös Loránd University. In the early 1980s, he worked at the state publishing house Gondolat, where he honed his distinctive prose, which would later transform Hungarian literature. His debut novel Satantango (1985) marked his breakthrough: a prophetic narrative exploring an abandoned collective farm. It became a literary sensation in Hungary and later gained international acclaim through translation. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish Academy began its biographical note with this work, emphasizing how a marginal setting can nurture world-class literature.
In English, Krasznahorkai’s rise is closely tied to his three translators—George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, and John Batki—who rendered his “typographical lava,” as Szirtes described it, into highly readable prose without stripping away its uniqueness. His book The World Goes On (2017) credited all three translators, while Szirtes and Mulzet shared the translation prize when Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 for his body of work. Mulzet’s English version of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming won the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019.
Cinema also expanded Krasznahorkai’s influence. He collaborated with filmmaker Béla Tarr on a grim cinematic trilogy: Satantango (1994), a monumental 7.5-hour black-and-white adaptation of his debut novel; Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), based on The Melancholy of Resistance; and The Turin Horse (2011), co-written with Tarr. These films are now considered landmarks of contemporary European cinema, mirroring the sprawling pace and vision of his prose.
Over his career, Krasznahorkai has earned prestigious accolades, including the Kossuth Prize (Hungary’s highest cultural honor), the Man Booker International Prize (2015), and the National Book Award for Translated Literature (2019). These honors, now crowned by the Nobel Prize, represent institutional recognition of what his readers and cinephiles have long known: his work is a coherent artistic project that creates a distinct literary universe addressing humanity’s deepest anxieties.
He is sometimes labeled under “bleak modernism,” yet the Nobel citation points to something deeper: “the reaffirmation of the power of art.” Beneath the surface of dread and nihilism in his work runs an undercurrent of attentiveness, patience, and beauty, confronting despair. For forty years, Krasznahorkai has written at the boundary between meaning and menace, faith and its collapse. By choosing him, the Swedish Academy signals that literature’s task today is to gaze steadily at a faltering world until its layers emerge—while acknowledging that some will remain beyond comprehension.
— Agencies
