Friday, October 10, 2025 - The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist and screenwriter whose “compelling and visionary oeuvre... in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art,” the Nobel Committee announced 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.”
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