Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
Born in 1954 in the south-eastern Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai rose to prominence with his debut novel Sátántangó (1985), a bleak portrait of life on a decaying collective farm in the late communist era. Several of his works have been adapted for cinema by Béla Tarr, including Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies (from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance). The Academy’s citation places his work in a Central European tradition while noting a contemplative tone shaped by travels and long residencies abroad.
Krasznahorkai’s international profile has been built on densely patterned prose, often in extended, syntactically intricate sentences. His novels and stories tend to probe social fragility, metaphysical dread and the collapse of order, themes that have prompted repeated comparisons with Franz Kafka, Herman Melville and Nikolai Gogol. The late Susan Sontag famously called him a “contemporary master of apocalypse”, a phrase that has accompanied Anglophone reception of his work for two decades.
The author has accumulated major international distinctions over the past decade. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, an award then given for a writer’s entire body of work, and in 2019 the US National Book Award for Translated Literature for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (tr. Ottilie Mulzet). Today’s Nobel makes him the first Hungarian laureate in literature since Imre Kertész in 2002.
Two novels have been especially visible in English translation. Sátántangó established his reputation outside Hungary and later became Tarr’s seven-hour film of the same name. The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) depicts a provincial town unsettled by the arrival of a travelling circus and a vast, embalmed whale; its atmosphere of menace and social breakdown fed directly into Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). These works exemplify his preoccupation with the erosion of civic bonds and the proximity of chaos beneath ordinary life.
The Nobel Committee’s wording highlights the paradox at the heart of his fiction: while it scrutinises “apocalyptic terror”, it also insists on art’s capacity to endure. That balance has informed later books, including Seiobo There Below, The World Goes On and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, in which cityscapes, pilgrimages and returning exiles serve as frames for questions about fate, ritual and the possibility of meaning.
Krasznahorkai’s readership extends well beyond Europe. His long association with New Directions in the United States helped consolidate a strong Anglophone audience, aided by translators George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. In recent years he has also published essays and shorter fictions that explore East Asian settings and motifs, reflecting periods spent in China and Japan.
This year’s choice comes after sustained attention from bookmakers and critics. On the eve of the announcement, the Hungarian writer shared joint-favourite status with the Chinese author Can Xue, while other frequently mentioned contenders included Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. The Academy’s selection aligns with recent patterns that favour formally ambitious prose and long bodies of work with cross-cultural reach.
The literature prize carries a purse of 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), alongside a medal and diploma. Laureates receive their awards in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Krasznahorkai’s win follows last year’s award to the South Korean novelist Han Kang.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the five prizes established in 1901 under Nobel’s will. It is conferred on an author whose work, in Nobel’s phrase, has produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Over time the Swedish Academy has interpreted that remit broadly, alternating between poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists across languages and continents. With today’s decision the Academy recognises a writer whose vision—steeped in Central Europe yet shaped by wider journeys—has become a reference point for contemporary serious fiction.
