New Delhi: Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature, recognising his demanding, pensive, and visionary body of work that bridges Central European and Eastern mystic traditions. His postmodern, near-surrealist oeuvre draws inspiration from literary greats such as Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett, yet extends beyond their influence to explore both historical and contemporary human experiences.
The Swedish Academy announced that Krasznahorkai was chosen “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” He is the second Hungarian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature after Imre Kertesz in 2002, and the first from Hungary to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
Krasznahorkai, 71, is known for his intricate and challenging literary style. His novels, novellas, short stories, screenplays, and other works are often characterised by long, unbroken sentences, fluid narratives that shift between characters, and a narrative pace that mirrors social change. He describes his own writing as “reality examined to the point of madness.”
His debut novel, Satantango (1985; English translation, Satan’s Tango, 2012), is a postmodern, multi-perspective work structured like a tango, alternating steps forward and back. Set in a decrepit, unnamed Hungarian village, it follows a conman who manipulates the villagers, ultimately dispersing them across the country. The novel was adapted into a seven-hour film by Hungarian director Bela Tarr in 1994.
Krasznahorkai’s second novel, Az ellenállás melankóliája (1989; English translation, The Melancholy of Resistance, 2000), is a political allegory set in an unnamed, restless town, featuring a mysterious circus with a dead whale and the disruptive arrival of a trainload of rabble-rousers, reflecting social and political upheavals in Communist-era Central and Eastern Europe.
He further explored international themes in Haború és háború (1999; War and War, 2006) about a Hungarian man obsessed with a manuscript who travels to New York City, and Rombolás és bánat az Ég alatt (2004; English translation, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, 2016), chronicling a Hungarian man’s journey to China to explore traditional Chinese culture.
In Seiobo járt odalent (2008; Seiobo There Below, 2013), Krasznahorkai spans time and geography from Japan to Persia, Renaissance Italy, and contemporary Europe, recounting the lives of real and fictional artists, with 17 chapters numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence. His 2016 novel, Baró Wenckheim hazatér (English translation, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, 2019), returns to Hungary and follows an eccentric aristocrat’s homecoming amid murder, local politics, and societal expectations—a work the author considers his culmination.
Krasznahorkai told The Paris Review, “I wasn't satisfied with the first, and that's why I wrote the second. I wasn’t satisfied with the second, so I wrote the third, and so on. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel, I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life.”
He has since written at least two more novels, still untranslated from Hungarian, along with two novellas and several non-fiction works, continuing his exploration of complex human realities and artistic expression.
With IANS inputs