Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai wins Nobel Prize in literature for work confronting ‘apocalyptic terror’

By Christian Edwards, CNN

(CNN) — The 2025 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian writer who said his dark and difficult novels aim to examine reality “to the point of madness.”

Announcing the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday, the Nobel Committee praised Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

When only a handful of his works were translated into English, the literary critic James Wood wrote that Krasznahorkai’s books were once “passed around like rare currency.” That has since changed, and the Nobel Committee said the award recognized a body of work that has won widespread acclaim and “is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.”

Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954 – two years before the Hungarian Revolution that was met with brutal repression by the Soviet Union – Krasznahorkai has previously said he grew up “in a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive.”

Dubbed the “contemporary master of the apocalypse” by the late American essayist Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai’s novels – often set in shivering Central European villages – depict townsfolk searching for meaning in symbols scattered across a godless world.

In “The Melancholy of Resistance,” published in 1989, a travelling circus arrives in a shabby town, bringing with it only the carcass of a giant whale. The whale feels like a potent symbol – a potential nod to Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” or even to Jonah being swallowed by a huge fish in the Old Testament – but Krasznahorkai’s meaning remains obscure.

Instead, one of the villagers, Mrs Eszter, sees the arrival of the circus as a chance to create chaos. The “mysterious and menacing spectacle sets extreme forces in motion, prompting the spread of both violence and vandalism,” the committee said. Mrs Eszter moves to stamp out the violence and claim power over the town, and soon has “swept away the old and established the new,” Krasznahorkai writes.

While the novel reads like an allegory for the rise of fascism, it is not clear if there is a lesson Krasznahorkai wants his readers to glean from it. His novels often resist neat moral solutions. In an interview this year, he stated flatly that “art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate” – and it is not, one might presume, advice about what to do with that “lostness.”

The first thing that strikes a reader of Krasnahorkai is the sentences: long, serpentine, self-revising. The novelist once said that the period “doesn’t belong to human beings – it belongs to God.” The result, as his translator George Szirtes says, is a “slow lava-flow of narrative.”

While the world of his novels is often sparse, the sentences are dense as granite. In his 1985 debut novel “Sátántangó,” in which villagers try to decipher whether the new arrival Irimiás is a con-man or a savior, a sentence describing a sunrise runs for the best part of a page:

“Sátántangó” was made into a film in 1994 by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai has collaborated on various screenplays. Despite its seven-hour run-time, Sontag said the film was “enthralling for every minute.”

His 2021 work “Herscht 07769” has been hailed as a great contemporary German novel, the committee said, “on account of its accuracy in portraying the country’s social unrest.”

The novel – which is written in a single sentence and opens with a comically bleak epitaph, “hope is a mistake” – describes how a physics student, convinced that his calculations show the world is set to break down, tries to enlist the help of then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, writing her a series of deranged letters.

Describing Krasznahorkai as “a great epic writer in the Central European tradition” running through Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, the committee notes that his later works adopt a more contemplative tone influenced by his travels to China and Japan.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, of whom Krasznahorkai has been a critic, was among those to congratulate the author, posting on X that the win “brings pride to our nation.”

Last year, the Nobel went to Han Kang, a South Korean author who was lauded for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The 2023 prize was awarded to Jon Fosse, a Norwegian novelist and playwright whose “radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms,” the committee said.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

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