STOCKHOLM: Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, the awards ceremony said on Thursday, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition stretching from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and characterized by absurdism and grotesque excesses,” the Academy said in a statement.
“But there are more strings to his bow, and he is also looking East by adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”
Second Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
Krasznahorkai, the second Hungarian to win the prize awarded by the Swedish Academy after Imre Kertesz in 2002, was born in the small town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border.
His 1985 breakthrough novel, Satantango, set in a similarly remote rural area, became a literary sensation in Hungary.
“The novel portrays, in powerfully evocative terms, a destitute group of residents of an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside, just before the fall of communism,” the Academy said.
Krasznahorkai had a close creative collaboration with the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Several of his works have been adapted for film by Tarr, including “Satantango” and “The Werckmeister Harmonies”.
Their collaboration has earned critical acclaim. In 1993 he received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy of Resistance.
Literature the fourth Nobel Prize of 2025
The prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.
Previous winners of the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million) literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who took first prize, American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner in 1949, British World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1953, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and Norwegian Jon Fosse in 2023.
Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang, who became the 18th woman (the first was Swedish author Selma Lagerlof in 1909) and the first South Korean to receive the prize.
Over the years, the Swedish Academy’s choices have drawn equal amounts of anger and applause.
In 2016, the prize for the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan led to criticism that his work was not real literature, while in 2019 the prize for the Austrian Peter Handke also received criticism.
Handke had attended the funeral in 2006 of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was seen by many as responsible for the deaths of thousands of ethnic Albanians killed in Kosovo and the displacement of nearly a million others during a brutal war waged by forces under his control in 1998-99.
Prize givers have also been accused in the past of being snobbish, having anti-American biases and ignoring some of literature’s greats, including Russia’s Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Ireland’s James Joyce.
