Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, aged 71, won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature. The announcement was made by the Swedish Academy, responsible for the honor, on the morning of this Thursday, 9th.
The honor was awarded to the author “for his convincing and visionary work that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”, as announced by the institution.
The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to an author for his or her entire body of work. The winner takes 11 thousand Swedish crowns, around R$6 million at the current price.
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Traditionally, award organizers call the winner before the official announcement. During the announcement, Mats Malm, permanent secretary and spokesman for the Swedish Academy, said he had just spoken to László Krasznahorkai by phone, “during a visit to Frankfurt, where he was.”
Krasznahorkai was one of the most popular names to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. He appeared with odds of 10/1 in the main bookmakers in England, alongside the Chinese Can Xue. Brazilian writer Milton Hatoum even appeared among the bets, with odds of 24/1.
Last year, the Swedish Academy surprised by awarding the prize to 54-year-old novelist Han Kang, the first South Korean to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the youngest to achieve the feat.
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Life and work
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai made his literary debut in 1985 with Satantango, published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras. The work – the only one by the author translated in the country – is called “visionary” and “monstrous” and follows the arrival of a mysterious man in a type of Hungarian rural settlement.
The book won an award for best novel translated into English decades later, in 2013. Satantango also gave rise to a seven and a half hour film of the same name, from 1994, by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai maintained a creative partnership.
The Swedish Academy classified the author as an epic writer from the Central European literary tradition, which ranges from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by “absurdity and grotesque excess”. Krasznahorkai’s work is commonly described as postmodern, dystopian and melancholic.
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In 2015, the writer received the celebrated Man Booker International Prize for his contribution to “fiction on the world stage”. At the time, the Booker judges praised his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of unbelievable length that go to unbelievable extremes, their tone changing from solemn to maddened, from ironic to heartbreaking, as they follow their wandering path.”
Krasznahorkai left Hungary still under Soviet rule in 1987, when he spent a year in West Berlin on a scholarship and was inspired by East Asian countries. In the following years he published books such as The Prisoner of Urga (1992), which follows one man’s journey along the Trans-Siberian railway from Mongolia to China.
Other examples of Eastern influence in Krasznahorkai’s prose are Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens (2004), in which the narrator travels through China in a quest to understand contemporary Chinese society, and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2003), which has as its protagonist the grandson of the Prince Genji
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Krasznahorkai is also the author of books The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens (2004), Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016).
