Hungary’s ‘visionary’ Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins 2025 Nobel Prize in literature
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The second Hungarian to win the prize awarded by the Swedish Academy, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in south-east Hungary, near the Romanian border.
PHOTO: AFP
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STOCKHOLM - Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature, the award-giving body said on Oct 9, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Swedish Academy said in a statement.
“But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”
The second Hungarian to win the prize awarded by the Swedish Academy, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in south-east Hungary, near the Romanian border.
His breakthrough 1985 novel, Satantango, is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary.
“The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism,” the academy said.
Krasznahorkai had a close creative partnership with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Several of his works have been adapted into films by Tarr, including Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.
Their collaboration has garnered critical acclaim. In 1993, Krasznahorkai received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy Of Resistance.
The Nobel Prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million kronor (S$1.5 million).
Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace have been awarded since 1901.
Past winners of the literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who bagged the first award; American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner in 1949; Britain’s World War II prime minister Winston Churchill in 1953; Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk in 2006; and Norway’s Jon Fosse in 2023.
Books of Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, are on display at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct 9.
PHOTO: AFP
The 2024 prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang, who became the 18th woman – the first was Swedish author Selma Lagerlof in 1909 – and the first South Korean to receive the award.
Over the years, the choices made by the Swedish Academy have drawn as much ire as applause.
In 2016, the award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan sparked criticism that his work was not proper literature, while Austrian Peter Handke’s prize also drew criticism in 2019.
Handke had attended the funeral in 2006 of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, seen by many as responsible for the deaths of thousands of ethnic Albanians who were killed in Kosovo and the displacement of almost one million others during a brutal war waged by forces under his control in 1998 and 1999.
Prize-givers have also in the past been accused of being snobbish, of having an anti-American bias and of ignoring some of the giants of literature, including Russia’s Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Ireland’s James Joyce. REUTERS
