Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, known for his disturbing, postmodern novels, has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy announced the news in a release Thursday morning, saying Krasznahorkai received the prize “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” He becomes the first Hungarian author to receive the award since Imre Kertész in 2002.
Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, and studied law and literature at Eötvös Loránd University. He published his debut novel, Satantango, in 1985, and followed that up with a short story collection, Relations of Grace, the next year.
Several more novels followed, many of them translated into English and published in the United States by New Directions, including The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War, both translated by George Szirtes; Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, translated by Ottilie Mulzet; and, most recently, Herscht 07769, translated by Mulzet.
Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker International Prize, alongside Szirtes and Mulzet, in 2015, for his body of work. He also won the National Book Award for translated literature in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.
In an interview with the Yale Review published in February, author Hari Kunzru asked Krasznahorkai about the role of art in the future.
“Art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate,” Krasznahorkai said. “Beauty exists. It lies beyond a boundary where we must constantly halt; we cannot go further to grasp or touch beauty—we can only gaze at it from this boundary and acknowledge that, yes, there is truly something out there in the distance. Beauty is a construction, a complex creation of hope and higher order.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
