Hungary's László Krasznahorkai Wins Nobel Prize In Literature

His novels, often set in melancholic Central European towns, depict characters desperately seeking meaning or salvation in a godless world.

Hungarian novelist and screenwriter, László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This was announced by the Nobel Committee in Stockholm on Thursday, October 9.

Krasznahorkai, whose dark and philosophically demanding novels have been described by the author himself as an attempt to examine reality “to the point of madness,” receives the prize, which includes a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately $1 million).

Born in 1954, Krasznahorkai's body of work has garnered international acclaim for its “absurdism and grotesque excess.” The late American essayist Susan Sontag famously dubbed him the “contemporary master of the apocalypse.”

His novels, often set in melancholic Central European towns, depict characters desperately seeking meaning or salvation in a godless world. Early in his career, before widespread translation, his books were "passed around like rare currency," according to literary critic James Wood.

One of his most renowned works, the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, serves as a powerful example of his themes. It describes the chaotic events following the arrival of a traveling circus in a dreary town, which displays nothing but the carcass of a giant whale.

The arrival of this unsettling spectacle sets off a chain of "violence and vandalism," according to the Nobel Committee. The novel’s plot centers on Mrs. Eszter, who exploits the chaos to seize power over the town, suggesting an allegory for the rise of totalitarianism, though Krasznahorkai's narratives typically resist clear-cut moral interpretations. The author has stated that art is merely "humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate.”

A defining characteristic of Krasznahorkai’s writing is his long, serpentine sentences. The author once quipped that the period “doesn’t belong to human beings – it belongs to God,” resulting in what translator George Szirtes called a “slow lava-flow of narrative.”

His 1985 debut, Sátántangó, features prose of granite-like density. In one passage describing a sunrise, the sentence runs for nearly an entire page, painting a vast, desperate picture of the world’s daily struggle:

“…to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily painting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.”

Sátántangó was adapted into a nearly seven-and-a-half-hour film in 1994 by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, marking the start of a notable creative collaboration.

More recently, his 2021 work Herscht 07769, which is written in a single uninterrupted sentence, was praised for its accurate portrayal of contemporary social unrest in Germany. The novel follows a physics student who, convinced his calculations predict the world's collapse, writes a series of deranged letters to the former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The book opens with a grim epigraph: “hope is a mistake.”

The Nobel Committee described Krasznahorkai as "a great epic writer in the Central European tradition" running through Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, noting that his later works have adopted a more contemplative tone influenced by his extensive travels and engagement with East Asian philosophy, including his time spent in Kyoto.

The author, a critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, was nonetheless congratulated by the Prime Minister on X, who stated the win "brings pride to our nation."

Krasznahorkai joins a list of recent laureates including Han Kang (2024), lauded for her “intense poetic prose,” and Jon Fosse (2023), recognized for his “radical reduction of language."