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Authors Guild Congratulates László Krasznahorkai on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

Literary Culture

October 10, 2025

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The Authors Guild congratulates László Krasznahorkai on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. In announcing the award, Mats Malm, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, praised the Hungarian writer “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the Swedish Academy, described Krasznahorkai as an extension of European modernist epic writing who “takes it to new heights,” noting that the author’s apocalyptic vision makes him “possibly more in tune with the times now than maybe he was even in 1985.” He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

Krasznahorkai, 71, is renowned for his distinctive prose style featuring extended, intricate sentences that create an immersive, almost trance-like experience for readers. His works, which frequently take place in isolated villages and collapsing communities, blend philosophical inquiry with wry, often dark humor. 

His 1985 debut novel Satantango established his reputation in Hungary and abroad. Set on a dysfunctional collective farm in the Hungarian countryside, the novel depicts impoverished residents visited by a charismatic leader, Irimiás, whom they thought dead. The book was adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr in 1994, marking the beginning of a prolific collaboration that would span six films.

The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), filled with long sentences and unpunctuated text, explores events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale. In Seiobo There Below (2008), Krasznahorkai journeys across cultures and time periods, meditating on beauty and art. His 2015 novel Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019.

Most recently, Herscht 07769 (2024) unfolds as a single unbroken sentence spanning 400 pages. It centers on Florian, a kind-hearted man obsessed with Bach and quantum physics who writes desperate letters to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel in hopes of averting the end of the world. 

In a statement following the announcement, Krasznahorkai said, “I am deeply glad that I have received the Nobel Prize—above all because this award proves that literature exists in itself, beyond various non-literary expectations, and that it is still being read.”

Krasznahorkai has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. His books have been published in English translation in the United States by New Directions, with over a dozen titles currently available.