The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Thursday, awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to Hungarian author and screenwriter, László Krasznahorkai, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
The academy, at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden, described the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate as “a great epic writer in the Central European tradition,” whose work “extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess.”
The award-giving body stated that the author has produced a string of works, inspired by deep-seated impressions, equally stirred by his journeys to China and Japan.
Mr Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border.
Mr Krasznahorkai’s work, ‘Satantango’, later adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarset, became a breakthrough novel in 1985, much appreciated for the literary sensation it inspired in Hungary.
The award-giving body said, “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.”
Another celebrated work, ‘Herscht 07769’ by the laureate, was described “as a great contemporary German novel, on account of its accuracy in portraying the country’s social unrest.”
In 1993, Mr Krasznahorkai received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for his work titled, ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’.
Mr Krasznahorkai’s novels, short stories and essays, including ‘War & War, Seiobo There Below, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,’ among many others, are popular in Germany and Hungary.
