Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. Photo / Leo Neumayr, APA, AFP
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, considered by many as Hungary’s most important living author, whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia and melancholy.
The Swedish Academy honoured him “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
Speaking to the Nobel Foundation, the 71-year-old author said he was “very happy” and “very proud”.
“To be in the line, which contains so many really great writers and poets, gives me power to use my language, my original language, the Hungarian language.”
The Academy highlighted Krasznahorkai’s first novel, 1985’s Satantango, which brought him to prominence in Hungary and remains his best-known work.
It called the novel, which portrays a destitute group of people isolated in the Hungarian countryside, “a literary sensation”.
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”, the Academy said.
“But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”
Krasznahorkai was among those mentioned as a possible winner before the announcement.
The Academy noted the author’s signature flowing syntax with long, winding sentences devoid of full stops.
“While it is Krasznahorkai’s weighty, rolling syntax that has perhaps become his signature as an author, his style also allows for a lightness of touch and a great lyrical beauty,” Academy member Steve Sem-Sandberg said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban hailed the prize to Krasznahorkai, calling him “the pride of Hungary”.
Krasznahorkai grew up in a middle-class Jewish family.
He has drawn inspiration from his experiences under communism, and the extensive travels he undertook after first moving abroad in 1987 to West Berlin for a fellowship.
His novels, short stories and essays are best known in Germany – where he lived for long periods – and his native Hungary.
Critically difficult and demanding, his style was described once by Krasznahorkai himself as “reality examined to the point of madness”.
“It is Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the Academy to award him this prize,” Sem-Sandberg said.
American critic Susan Sontag crowned Krasznahorkai the “master of the apocalypse” after having read his second book, The Melancholy of Resistance, in 1989, the Academy said.
Described as a “feverish horror fantasy” by the Academy, the novel is set in a small Hungarian town where a mysterious circus arrives, its main attraction the exhibition of a giant whale carcass.
His War and War novel (1999) was described by New Yorker magazine critic James Wood as “one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have ever had as a reader”.
Asked in the Nobel Foundation interview about his main inspiration, Krasznahorkai replied: “The bitterness,” describing a “very, very dark” time to be alive.
“I am very sad, if I think of the status of the world now, and this is my deepest inspiration,” he said.
Literature offered hope, he said in a statement sent to AFP through his literary agency RCW.
The Nobel “proves that literature exists in itself, beyond various non-literary expectations, and that it is still being read”.
“And for those who read it, it offers a certain hope that beauty, nobility, and the sublime still exist for their own sake. It may offer hope even to those in whom life itself only barely flickers.”
Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian to win the prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002.
The Academy has long been criticised for the over-representation of Western white men among its picks.
Just 18 of the 122 laureates since the prize was first awarded in 1901 have been women, including last year’s winner Han Kang of South Korea.
The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a US$1.2 million ($1.5m) prize sum.
Krasznahorkai will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.
-Agence France-Presse