The 2025 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist who said his dark and difficult novels aim to examine reality “to the point of madness.”
Announcing the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday, the Nobel Committee praised Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
With only a handful of his works translated into English, the literary critic James Wood once wrote that Krasznahorkai’s books “get passed around like rare currency.” But the Nobel Committee said the award recognized a body of work that “is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess” and has won widespread acclaim.
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954 – two years before the Hungarian Revolution that was met with brutal repression by the Soviet Union – Krasznahorkai has previously said he grew up “in a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive.”
Dubbed by the late American essayist Susan Sontag the “contemporary master of the apocalypse,” Krasznahorkai’s novels – often set in shivering Central European villages – depict townsfolk searching for meaning in symbols scattered across a godless world.
Source: CNN
