The award of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai honours the work of a writer who has been unwavering in his devotion to the art of writing.
During his career, he has teased out the possibilities of artistic expression and sought to remake or reinvigorate multiple forms of storytelling.
From his first novel Satantango, published in 1985 – and translated by the Hungarian poet George Szirtes into English in 2012 – to subsequent fictions such as The Melancholy of Resistance (1998), War & War (2006), Seiobo There Below (2013) and Herscht 07769 (2024), Krasznahorkai has tested the limits of language and the novel form.
His works, however, are not empty formalistic exercises but extraordinary immersive experiences in a world that is uniquely of the author’s creation. The sentences and monologues that can, on occasion, run to hundreds of pages carry the reader along in a bewitching current of word, image and story.
RM Block
The Nobel citation mentions Krasznahorkai’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
The Hungarian author’s world is a bleak one with collapse an ever-present possibility and hope a perpetually scarce commodity. There is a deep distrust of grand messianic programmes of political or religious redemption, and Krasznahorkai remains sceptical about the promise of human compassion, but he is never overbearing or didactic.
Growing up in communist Hungary, he was unpersuaded by the rhetoric of the regime. And in more recent years he has been equally dismissive of the ethno-nationalist posturing of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Born in Gyula, Transylvania, near the border with Romania, he shares with the previous Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize, Imre Kertész (2002), a Jewish background and a hostility to the sentimental groupthink of faith and fatherland.
An enthusiastic reader of Franz Kafka from an early age, Krasznahorkai was also deeply taken by the work of Nikolai Gogol and Samuel Beckett. It was the epic scope and stylistic ambition of Herman Melville that proved to be the most enduring influence. In his novella, Spadework for a Palace (2018, English translation published in 2020), the main character is obsessed with Melville and roams the streets of Manhattan looking for traces of the author of Moby Dick.
It is not only writers who have informed Krasznahorkai’s work but composers, in particular, Bach, whose art of the fugue has been a repeated source of inspiration for his experiments with story and language.
Krasznahorkai sees the formal lessons of the great German composer as a way of going beyond the excessive emphasis on character and narrative self in the Western novel tradition; Bach’s presence looms large in his most recent work, Herscht 07769: A Novel.
Krasznahorkai’s preferred settings for his works are often more remote places as in the rural backwaters and small towns of Satantango or The Melancholy of Resistance. His main characters frequently belong to an identifiable central European tradition of the hapless anti-hero, such as the humble archivist Korim in War & War, whose journey from Budapest to New York becomes a wry undoing.
Krasznahorkai spent much of the 1990s travelling through eastern Asia; and his collection of stories Seiobo There Below centres around notions of creation, beauty and impermanence, constants in the writings and artwork of Japan and Classical China.
In a world beset by conflict, genocidal killing and the apocalyptic uncertainties of climate and the nuclear threat, the choice of Krasznahorkai as this year’s Nobel laureate could not be more timely.
The Swedish Academy has also reaffirmed its faith in the power of literature not only to expand its own sense of possibility but also to offer humans a compass for navigating the ever-present undertow of the unpredictable.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
What to read
The Melancholy of Resistance (1998)
A feverish horror fantasy played out in a small Hungarian town. “A masterpiece of point-of-view writing and pelting along – courtesy of the most insane sentence structures. It’s funny, tragic, disturbing and deeply joyful.”
Seiobo There Below (2015)
A collection of stories presented as a novel, ranging from the opening prose poem featuring a lone heron poised to kill to a tragic comedy about an elderly tourist intent on visiting the Acropolis in a heatwave.
Herscht 07769 (2024)
A small town in Germany is afflicted by social anarchy, murder and arson. A paean to depth and meaning that reaches for wonder and wisdom amid violence and death.
