László Krasznahorkai wins the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
László is the author of five novels and several collections of essays and short stories. His novels include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, Seiobo There Below, The Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, Herscht07769 and Zsolme is Waiting which was published in early 2024. He has won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Formentor 2024 for his full body of work, the Libri Prize in 2022, the International Man Booker Prize in 2015, the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019, the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and, in 1993, the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. He is also a two-time winner of the Best Translated Book Award in the US, alongside George Szirtes, the translator of Satantango, and Ottilie Mulzet, the translator of Seiobo There Below. In 2010, he wrote a novella entitled Animalinside which was illustrated by the German painter Max Neumann. Satantango was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013, and The World Goes On was longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize 2018. His novel Herscht 07769 is currently in translation in many languages. His work has been translated into forty languages.
"I'm very happy, I'm calm and very nervous altogether," the author told Swedish broadcaster Sveriges Radio after hearing the news.
He follows fellow RCW clients Han Kang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Olga Tokarczuk, and Abdulrazak Gurnah who were the recipients of the 2024, 2017, 2018 and 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature respectively.
Photograph © Hartwig Klappert, Berlin
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