The Nobel prize in literature for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy has announced.
The academy cited the 71-year-old’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
Krasznahorkai is known for his dystopian, melancholic novels, which have won numerous prizes, including the 2019 National Book award for translated literature and the 2015 International Booker prize. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been adapted into feature films.
“I am deeply glad that I have received the Nobel prize – above all because this award proves that literature exists in itself, beyond various non-literary expectations, and that it is still being read,” said Krasznahorkai. “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.”
The novelist Colm Tóibín described Krasznahorkai as “a unique literary visionary who has opened up a huge amount of rich space in the contemporary novel showing what can be done”.
“Krasznahorkai richly deserves the prize,” said the novelist Hari Kunzru. “He has a reputation as an austere figure of European high culture, and indeed some of his work is uncompromisingly bleak and difficult, but he’s also a curious, playful and very funny writer. When I read him, I feel fortified, both as a human being and as someone who’s trying to make art. He shows me what’s possible.”
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai first made his mark with his 1985 debut novel Satantango, a mesmerising portrayal of a collapsing rural community. The novel would go on to win the Man Booker International prize in English three decades later, in 2015. It was also famously adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai has had a long creative partnership.
Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is known for his long, winding sentences (the 12 chapters of Satantango each consist of a single paragraph) and the kind of relentless intensity that has led critics to compare him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka.
“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,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee.
He described Krasznahorkai’s prose as having “developed towards … flowing syntax with long, winding sentences devoid of full stops that has become his signature.”
Susan Sontag has described the author as “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse”, while WG Sebald praised the universality of his vision. Only a few of Krasznahorkai’s works have been translated into English. The literary critic James Wood once wrote that his books “get passed around like rare currency”.
Krasznahorkai’s career has been shaped by travel as much as by language. He first left communist Hungary in 1987, spending a year in West Berlin for a fellowship, and later drew inspiration from east Asia – particularly Mongolia and China – for works such as The Prisoner of Urga, and Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens.
While working on War and War, he travelled widely across Europe and lived for a time in Allen Ginsberg’s New York apartment, describing the legendary Beat poet’s support as crucial to completing the novel.
Asked how he would describe his work in an interview with the Guardian in 2015, Krasznahorkai said: “Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell.”
On people discovering his work for the first time, he added: “If there are readers who haven’t read my books, I couldn’t recommend anything to read to them; instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books.”
Before the announcement, Ladbrokes had listed Can Xue, the avant garde Chinese writer, and Krasznahorkai as joint favourites for this year’s prize.
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded on 117 previous occasions since 1901. Recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Last year’s recipient was Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for The Vegetarian.
Krasznahorkai will formally receive the medal and diploma in a ceremony in Stockholm in December.
“Krasznahorkai reminds us life is difficult, agency almost always out of reach, and the colours of many times and places sombre,” said the poet and writer Fiona Sampson in response to his win. His work, she says, is “an essential read for these times, not least in a Europe once again feeling the squeeze between Russia and the US”.
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