The Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai is the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy awarded him the award “for his compelling and visionary work which, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. Seventy-one years old, considered one of the major contemporary authors of Hungarian literature and among the most significant voices on the European scene, Krasznahorkai is often defined as “the prophet of the narrative apocalypse”. The author achieved international recognition in 2015 with the “Man Booker International Prize”, and over time he has consolidated a reputation as a radical and uncompromising writer, capable of blending philosophical vision and narrative tension.
Who is the “prophet of the narrative apocalypse”
Born in Gyula on January 5, 1954, Krasznahorkai studied law in Szeged and Hungarian language and literature in Budapest. At the beginning of his career he worked for a few years as an editor until 1984, when he dedicated himself completely to writing.
Krasznahorkai’s narrative moves along coordinates that revolve around stasis, waiting and the impossibility of redemption. In his works there are no heroes in the traditional sense of the term. His protagonists rather seem like puppets moved by invisible strings, solitary and marginalized figures who live in a continuous state of fugue. It is a dark and complex literary universe, crossed by a sense of restlessness and a metaphysical tension that has made the author a point of reference for contemporary European fiction.
László Krasznahorkai – awarded the 2025 #NobelPrize in Literature – was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. A similar remote rural area is the scene of Krasznahorkai’s first novel ‘Sátántangó’, published in 1985 (‘Satantango’,… pic.twitter.com/ssEDBfumCX
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2025
His writing is characterized by very long sentences, devoid of traditional punctuation, constructed in a hypnotic and obsessive way, which convey a narrative continually poised between rationality and delirium. His style has been compared to a “narrative lava flow”, as defined by the poet George Szirtes, his English translator. But more than fluidity, it refers to a progressive stratification: his sentences accumulate materials, deviations, secondary thoughts, as if each syntactic unit contained within itself an entire mental map.
In his works there are no heroes in the traditional sense of the term. His protagonists rather seem like puppets moved by invisible strings, solitary and marginalized figures who live in a continuous state of fugue. It is a dark and complex literary universe, crossed by a sense of restlessness and a metaphysical tension that has made the author a point of reference for contemporary European fiction.
What are his most famous books
In Italy, Bompiani has published several of his novels: Satantango, finalist for the Gregor Von Rezzori Prize and the European Strega Prize 2017; Melancholia of resistance, The return of Baron Wenckheim (winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019), War and war, Seiobo has descended here and Avanti va il mondo.
Over the course of his career, Krasznahorkai has received numerous international awards, including the Tibor Déry Prize, the SWR Bestenliste Prize, the Kossuth Prize, the Sándor Márai Prize, the Brucke Berlin and the Spycher Prize. In 2021 he was also awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
