Hungarian ‘Master of the apocalypse’ Krasznahorkai wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

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By Justyna Pawlak and Johan Ahlander

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature 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 that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), said in a statement.

“But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”

‘MY LIFE IS A PERMANENT CORRECTION’

Speaking to Swedish Radio, Krasznahorkai said he had only planned to write one book, but after reading his debut novel, “Satantango”, he wanted to improve his writing with another one. “My life is a permanent correction,” he said.

The settings of his novels move across central Europe’s remote villages and towns, from Hungary to Germany, before skipping to the Far East, where his travels to China and Japan left deep-seated impressions on Krasznahorkai.

The American critic Susan Sontag crowned him contemporary literature’s “master of the apocalypse”, the Academy said, “a judgement she arrived at after having read the author’s second book Melancholy of Resistance”.

The second Hungarian to win the prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border.

“Satantango”, his 1985 breakthrough, is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary.

“The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism,” the Academy said.

Across the region, collective farms had been set up when farming land was confiscated at the start of communist rule, and many had become symbols of mismanagement and poverty by the time it ended in 1989.

“Everyone in the novel is waiting for a miracle to happen, a hope that is from the very outset punctured by the book’s introductory (Franz) Kafka motto: ‘In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it’,” the Academy said.

Krasznahorkai has repeatedly referenced “The Castle” by Kafka as a key influence.

“When I am not reading Kafka, I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka, I miss thinking about him,” he told the White Review in 2013.

ORBAN CONGRATULATES FIERCE CRITIC

A fierce critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Krasznahorkai has said his government was a “psychiatric case” because of its stance on the Ukraine war. Orban opposes military aid to Kyiv and says Hungary should stay out of the war.

“How can a country be neutral when the Russians invade a neighboring country?” Krasznahorkai said in an interview with the Yale Review in February.

Reacting to the news, Orban wrote in a short message on X: “Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary’s Nobel Prize laureate in literature, brings pride to our nation. Congratulations!”

Much of Krasznahorkai’s inspiration comes from experiences in central Europe on the cusp of the fall of communism. In 1987, he moved from communist Hungary to West Berlin, where he said he found “a democratic ambience” he had never experienced before.

“Ever since, I have never forgotten the taste of freedom,” he said in an interview on the Friderikusz Podcast in 2023.

DARK THEMES MAY RESONATE WITH 21ST CENTURY READERS

Krasznahorkai’s writing may resonate with readers immersed in news from Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, said Jason Whittaker, Professor of Communications at the University of Lincoln.

“We seem to have entered the 21st century in a more hostile and bleak environment than we hoped for at the end of the 20th,” Whittaker said. “So actually … some of the bleak and darkly comic elements of books such as Satantango actually will resonate with many more readers than previously.”

Krasznahorkai had a close creative partnership with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Several of his works have been adapted into films by Tarr, including “Satantango”, which runs to more than seven hours, and “The Werckmeister Harmonies”.

“When I read (Satantango), I knew it immediately that I must make a film based on it,” Tarr told Reuters by phone. “I am very happy… it’s hard to say anything right now.”

Their collaboration has garnered 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

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace have been awarded since 1901.

Past winners of the literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who bagged the first award, American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner in 1949, Britain’s World War Two Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1953.

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 award.

($1 = 9.3420 Swedish crowns)

(Reporting by Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw; additional reporting by Krisztina Than in Budapest, Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Greta Rosen Fondahn, Niklas Pollard and Marie Mannes in Stockholm; Editing by Alex Richardson)