The Nobel prize in literature for 2025 has been awarded to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy has introduced.
The Academy cited the 71-year-old’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, within the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the ability of artwork”.
Krasznahorkai is understood for his dystopian, melancholic novels, which have gained quite a few prizes, together with the 2019 Nationwide Guide award for translated literature and the 2015 Man Booker Worldwide prize. A number of of his works, together with his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been tailored into characteristic movies.
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai first made his mark along with his 1985 debut novel Satantango, a bleak and mesmerising portrayal of a collapsing rural group. The novel would go on to win the Man Booker Worldwide prize award in English practically three many years later, in 2013.
Typically described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is understood for his lengthy, winding sentences (the 12 chapters of Satantango every include a single paragraph), dystopian and melancholic themes, and the form of relentless depth that has led critics to match him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka. Satantango, was famously tailored right into a seven-hour movie by director Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai has had a protracted inventive partnership.
“Krasznahorkai is a good epic author within the central European custom that extends by Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque extra,” mentioned Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee.
He described Krasznahorkai’s prose as having “developed in direction of … flowing syntax with lengthy, winding sentences devoid of full stops that has change into his signature.”
Susan Sontag has described the writer as “the modern Hungarian grasp of apocalypse”, whereas WG Sebald praised the universality of his imaginative and prescient. Just a few of Krasznahorkai’s works have been translated into English. The literary critic James Wooden as soon as wrote that his books “get handed round like uncommon foreign money.”
Krasznahorkai’s profession has been formed by journey as a lot as by language. He first left communist Hungary in 1987, spending a yr in West Berlin for a fellowship, and later drew inspiration from east Asia – notably Mongolia and China – for works equivalent to The Prisoner of Urga, and Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens.
Whereas engaged on Battle and Battle, he travelled broadly throughout Europe and lived for a time in Allen Ginsberg’s New York condominium, describing the legendary Beat poet’s help as essential to finishing the novel.
Requested how he would describe his work in an interview with the Guardian in 2015, Krasznahorkai mentioned: “Letters; then from letters, phrases; then from these phrases, some quick sentences; then extra sentences which might be longer, and in the principle very lengthy sentences, at some point of 35 years. Magnificence in language. Enjoyable in hell.”
On readers discovering his work for the primary time, he added: “If there are readers who haven’t learn my books, I couldn’t advocate something to learn to them; as an alternative, I’d advise them to exit, sit down someplace, maybe by the aspect of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to consider, simply remaining in silence like stones. They’ll ultimately meet somebody who has already learn my books.”
Earlier than the announcement, Labrokes had listed the favourites for this yr’s prize as Can Xue an avant garde Chinese language author, and Krasznahorkai.
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded on 117 earlier events since 1901. Latest laureates embody Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Final yr’s recipient was Han Kang, the South Korean writer greatest identified for The Vegetarian.
Krasznahorkai will formally obtain the medal and diploma in a ceremony in December in Stockholm.
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