STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist, for what the Swedish Academy called his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.
Krasznahorkai, 71, is a writer’s writer of monumental reputation: novels built from sentences that can run for pages, set in a Mitteleuropa of decaying villages, rain, suspicion and sudden grace. “Satantango”, his 1985 debut — filmed by Béla Tarr as a seven-hour masterpiece — made his name; “The Melancholy of Resistance”, “War & War” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” confirmed it.
He is the second Hungarian laureate, after Imre Kertész in 2002, and his win will be read in the context of his country’s politics: Krasznahorkai has been a critic of Viktor Orbán’s government, and much of his work circles the question of how societies fall to fear and demagogy. The Academy, characteristically, cited only the art.
In Hungary, reactions split predictably: the literary world celebrated, government-aligned media were muted. Internationally, the announcement delighted the anglophone publishers who have championed him for two decades — his translators, notably Ottilie Mulzet and the late George Szirtes, were name-checked across the literary press.
The Academy’s citation ends with the word art, and that is the note his readers will take: a body of work that stares at catastrophe — historical, political, metaphysical — and answers it with sentences that refuse to end.
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