László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel prize in literature 2025 by Abdullah Al Hadi.
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 (ক্রাসনাহোরকাই) 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.
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai (ক্রাসনাহোরকাই) first made his mark with his 1985 debut novel Satantango a mesmerising portrayal of a collapsing rural community.
Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai (ক্রাসনাহোরকাই) 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’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.
In a point, asked how he would describe his work in an interview with the Guardian in 2015, Krasznahorkai (ক্রাসনাহোরকাই) 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.”
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.”
On people discovering his work for the first time, Krasznahorkai 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.”
About the Nobel László Krasznahorkai (ক্রাসনাহোরকাই) “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.”
Krasznahorkai’s Baron wenckheim’s homecoming as “a unique literary visionary who has opened up a huge amount of rich space in the contemporary novel showing what can be done”. Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, is the culmination of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s remarkable and singular career. Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.
Another remarkable novel, Spadework for a Palace, a joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds. A single eighty-page-long sentence, scrawled in the journal of a “gray little librarian” who is named “herman melvill,” and who is losing his mind. By choosing this difficult form and this metafictional name, Krasznahorkai comes dangerously close to replicating the brainy but predictable tropes of deconstructionist archive fiction.
In a fine we could say “He (László Krasznahorkai) 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. (The Guardian)
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.
László Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature, after Imre Kártés in 2002. (The Guardian)
Abdullah Al Hadi, Poet & Literature & the President of the 31st Bcs Cadre Association.