Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2025 “for his compelling and visionary body of work that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, affirms the power of art,” the Academy announced on Thursday.
“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that stretches from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Academy’s statement said.
“But his bow has more strings, and he also looks to the East, adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone,” it added.
Krasznahorkai, the second Hungarian to win the prize awarded by the Swedish Academy after Imre Kertesz in 2002, was born in the small town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border.
His 1985 novel Satantango, which achieved great success, is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary.
The novel, in a powerfully evocative way, portrays a poor group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in a Hungarian village shortly before the fall of communism, the Academy said.
