Thursday 09/October/2025 – 02:11 PM
The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasnahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, in recognition of his “compelling and insightful literature that reaffirms the power of art in the midst of horrific terrorism.”
Information about Hungarian Laszlo Krasnahorkai, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature
Laszlo Krasnahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. He is known for his literary works of a deep philosophical nature, which mix symbolism, absurdity, and existential obsession, and depict a world living on the brink of moral and human collapse.
His name first appeared in 1985 with the publication of his famous novel Sátántangó, which became a landmark in contemporary Hungarian literature. The events of the novel take place in an abandoned village after the fall of the socialist regime, where a group of poor people live waiting for a miracle, until a mysterious man appears who changes the course of their lives, in a scene in which despair is mixed with hope and deception with salvation. In 1994, the novel was turned into a film that received widespread critical acclaim, directed by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.
After his first success, Laszlo Krasnahorkai continued to present works full of tension and chaos, most notably the novel “The Melancholy of Resistance,” published in 1989. The novel deals with fictional events taking place in a small town where a mysterious circus arrives carrying the carcass of a giant whale, which leads to an explosion of chaos and the spread of violence, in a symbolic projection of the collapse of values and political and social systems.
In his 1999 novel War and War, Laszlo Krasnahorkai went beyond his country’s borders to tell the story of Koren, a simple archivist who decides to travel from Budapest to New York to publish a manuscript that he sees as greater than history itself.
This novel is characterized by flowing prose language and long, continuous sentences without stopping, which later became the writer’s distinctive style, which mixes literary narrative with philosophical thought in addressing issues of chaos, alienation, and human salvation.
A literary journey that defies time
Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of the most prominent voices in modern European literature. He has previously won prestigious awards, including the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, and his works have been translated into dozens of languages.
Critics believe that his winning the Nobel Prize this year represents a tribute to profound philosophical literature that does not merely describe reality, but rather seeks to understand the essence of man in the face of devastation. With this victory, Krasznahorkai joins a list of major Hungarian writers who have left a global mark.
