Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature to Hungarian novelist and screenwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

The second Hungarian to win the prestigious literary award, Krasznahorkai, 71, was recognised on Thursday “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

Born in the small southeastern Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai draws inspiration in his writing from his experiences under communism and the extensive travels he undertook after first moving abroad in 1987 to West Berlin for a fellowship.

His novels, short stories and essays are best known in Germany, where he lived for long periods, and Hungary, where he is considered by many as the country’s most important living author.

“He is a hypnotic writer,” Krasznahorkai’s English language translator, the poet George Szirtes, told the AFP news agency. “He draws you in until the world he conjures echoes and echoes inside you, until it’s your own vision of order and chaos”.

Critically difficult and demanding, Krasznahorkai once described his own style as “reality examined to the point of madness”. His penchant for long sentences and few paragraph breaks has also seen the writer labelled as “obsessive”.

Several of Krasznahorkai’s works, including his debut, Satantango, and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

In winning the Nobel Prize, now worth $1.2m, he joins an illustrious list of laureates that includes Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Last year, the award went to South Korean author Han Kang, who was praised “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Han was the first South Korean writer and 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature.