Making sense: On Krasznahorkai and the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025

At a time of two wars in the world, a writer described as a “master of the apocalypse” has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025. Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was chosen by the Swedish Academy “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. The 71-year-old novelist and screenwriter has won many accolades and was a perennial candidate. Often compared to greats such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Herman Melville, his dystopian, absurd and melancholic stories mirror life in Hungary under oppression and beyond in the pre and post-fall of the Iron Curtain era, with a chilling resonance to contemporary times. He gained recognition with his 1985 novel of ideas, Satantango, translated into English by George Szirtes in 2012. It revolves around a group of destitute residents of a collective farm on the eve of the fall of communism, waiting for a miracle, which needless to say would not happen. The tone is set with the epigraph, from Kafka’s The Castle: ‘In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.’ Krasznahorkai has collaborated with film-maker Béla Tarr to adapt his works for the cinema. With his second book, The Melancholy of Resistance, he began to be hailed as a postmodern visionary. It was published in Hungarian in 1989, when the wall came down, and first translated into English in 1998.

In The Melancholy, a circus comes to a town with the carcass of a giant whale, and sinister happenings follow. His unbroken sentences — like a fellow laureate, Jon Fosse, Krasznahorkai too often omits full stops — are often deemed difficult and demanding. His translator calls Krasznahorkai’s work “a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”. Krasznahorkai’s travels to China and Japan in the early 2000s inspired his contemplative novel, Seiobo There Below. The breadth of his oeuvre is evident in the homage he pays to literary giants: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot gets a relook in Baron Wenckheim’sHomecoming; Melville’s ghost haunts Spadework for a Palace: Entering the Madness of Others, a story set in Manhattan. In an interview to writer Hari Kunzru for The Yale Review, Krasznahorkai says “the apocalypse is now”, pointing out that “hell and heaven are both on earth, and they are here now”. About the role of art in the future, he says: “Art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate.” By awarding literature’s top prize to Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy signals that it is turning to serious but innovative literature and art in a world where little makes sense.