The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who previously won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. Krasznahorkai is known for his difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, which explore dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), have been adapted into feature films by director Béla Tarr.
The author was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. A similar remote rural area is the setting of Krasznahorkai’s first novel, Sátántangó, published in 1985 (Satantango, 2012), which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work. 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.
Silence and anticipation reign until the charismatic Irimiás and his crony Petrina, who were believed by all to be dead, suddenly appear. To the waiting residents, they seem as messengers of either hope or the last judgment. The satanic element referred to in the title of the book is present in their slave morality and in the pretenses of the trickster Irimiás, which, as effective as they are deceitful, leave almost all of the residents tied up in knots. Everyone in the novel is waiting for a miracle to happen—a hope that is from the outset punctured by the book’s introductory Kafka motto: “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” The novel was made into a highly original 1994 film in collaboration with director Béla Tarr.
