Literature Nobel Goes to Hungarian Author Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Wire Staff
Real journalism holds power accountable
Since 2015, The Wire has done just that.
But we can continue only with your support.
New Delhi: The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 was awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art."
A practitioner of a literary style characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess, Krasznahorkai is an emblem of the Central European tradition of which Kafka and Thomas Bernhard are examples. But, interestingly, he also looked eastward. The following is a summary of his work as tabulated in the Nobel Prize's official website.
Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. A similar remote rural area is the scene of Krasznahorkai’s first novel Sátántangó, published in 1985, which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work.
The American critic Susan Sontag soon crowned Krasznahorkai contemporary literature’s ‘master of the apocalypse’, a judgement she arrived at after having read the author’s second book Az ellenállás melankóliája (1989; The Melancholy of Resistance, 1998).
In the novel Háború és háború (1999; 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. It anticipates his great novel Báró Wenckheim hazatér (2016; Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, 2019), although on this occasion the focus is on returning to the homeland, as Krasznahorkai plays lavishly with literary tradition
A part of his ‘apocalyptic’ epics is also Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bach- regénye (2021; Herscht 07769: A Novel, 2024), often described as a great contemporary German novel, on account of its accuracy in portraying the country’s social unrest.
His journeys to China and Japan led to his 2003 novel Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó (A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, 2022) and the rich Seiobo járt odalent (2008; Seiobo There Below, 2013), a collection of seventeen stories arranged in a Fibonacci sequence about the role of beauty and artistic creation in a world of blindness and impermanence.
This article went live on October ninth, two thousand twenty five, at zero minutes past five in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.