‘More than a catastrophe’: How László Krasznahorkai reacted to winning the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

For a writer long hailed as one of the most challenging and visionary voices in European literature, the Nobel citation — “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art” — might almost have been written inside one of his own sentences. Krasznahorkai’s response, however, was disarmingly human.

“I’m very happy and I’m very proud,” he said. “To be in the line which contains so many really great writers and poets gives me power to use my original language, the Hungarian language. I am really very proud and very happy to use this little language.”

The weight of bitterness

László Krasznahorkai’s novels include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.

Asked what fuels his writing, Krasznahorkai didn’t hesitate. “The bitterness,” he said. “I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration.”

That mixture of melancholy and moral urgency has defined his novels — Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming — with their vast, spiralling sentences and visions of decay and transcendence. Yet even as he spoke of sadness, he framed it as a kind of responsibility.

“These are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before,” he said. “This could be an inspiration for the next generation — to survive.”

‘Without fantasy, It’s an absolute different life’

If bitterness is one pole of Krasznahorkai’s imagination, fantasy is the other, the vital counterforce.

“I wish for everybody to get back the ability to use their fantasy,” he said. “Because without fantasy, it is an absolute different life. To read books and to enjoy and to be rich, because reading gives us more power to survive these very, very difficult times on Earth.”

A private writer in a restless world

Despite the sudden spotlight, Krasznahorkai remains a private man. “This is my private thing actually, the writing,” he said. “I normally never speak about what I write. I am writing a book and after that, I give it to my publishers… and then I start again with a new book to make better than what I did before.”

He divides his life between homes in Hungary, Trieste, and Vienna — “actually, the old Austrian-Hungarian monarchy,” he added with a faint smile — and even on the day of his Nobel announcement, he had errands to run.

“I am going to an administrator to report my new address,” he said. “I didn’t count on these fantastic news. Maybe in the evening we will make some dinner here in Frankfurt with port wine and champagne.”

A catastrophe of joy

Just like his novels, Krasznahorkai’s words tumble between irony and sincerity, despair and radiance. In the midst of a dark, uncertain century, he still insists on the salvaging force of imagination. “To be in this line gives me power,” he said softly. “And gratitude to all the readers who still believe in fantasy and in art.”

It is, in his own words, more than a catastrophe — the kind of catastrophe that reaffirms faith in literature itself.