Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 Winners LIVE Updates: László Krasznahorkai, Hungary’s master of the apocalypse, wins

Here are some of László Krasznahorkai's most famous works:

1. Krasznahorkai’s first novel Sátántangó, published in 1985 (Satantango, 2012), was a literary sensation in Hungary.

2. His second book, Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance, 1998) was horror fantasy. It prompted Susan Sontag to call him ‘master of the apocalypse’

3. His novel Háború és háború (1999; War & War, 2006) Krasznahorkai shifts attention to beyond the borders of his Hungarian homeland

4. His most famous work Báró Wenckheim hazatér (Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, 2019), Dostoyevsky’s idiot is reincarnated in the hopelessly infatuated baron with his gambling addiction

5. His fifth novel an Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bachregénye (Herscht 07769: A Novel, 2024) too was apocalypse epic set in Germany

He is the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since Imre Kertész in 2002, joining an illustrious lineage that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his dense, apocalyptic prose and philosophical depth. Often called the “writer of the apocalypse”, Krasznahorkai’s work captures humanity on the brink — of collapse, transcendence, and revelation.

From Satantango to The Melancholy of Resistance and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, his fiction unfolds in long, hypnotic sentences that mimic chaos itself, spiralling through despair, faith, and absurdity. His worlds crumble, yet within ruin, he finds beauty and endurance.

Here we go! It is finally happening! The literary world is holding its breath as the Swedish Academy prepares to step up to the podium in Stockholm. In just a few minutes, the curtain will lift on one of the most anticipated cultural moments of the year: the announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Will it be Gerald Murnane, the reclusive Australian whose meditative prose has captivated readers? Or perhaps László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian master of long sentences and existential despair? Could it even be Amitav Ghosh, ending India’s 112-year wait since Tagore’s win?

Today the world will find out who this year's literature laureate is.

Who do you think will be awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature?

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As we count down the final minutes to this year’s Nobel announcement, last year’s winner Han Kang still lingers in the conversation, the writer who showed the world that resistance can be silent and deeply human.

Her 2024 win for “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” cemented her as one of the most empathetic voices of our time. From The Vegetarian’s haunting exploration of a woman’s revolt against violence to Human Acts’ tender reckoning with South Korea’s Gwangju Massacre, Han writes where pain meets grace.

Each book is an act of remembrance — for the dead, for the silenced, for the parts of us we’d rather not face. In her hands, loss becomes language. As the world waits for a new laureate, Han’s work reminds us that literature’s truest gift is empathy.

As we await this year’s Nobel announcement, it’s worth revisiting the quiet revolution of Jon Fosse, last year’s laureate from Norway. A playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist, Fosse was honoured in 2023 “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” His writing, often described as slow prose, is hypnotic — steeped in pauses, repetition, and silences that speak louder than words.

Fosse, now 64, once said he writes from a place “for listening and movement” — a mental borderland between safety and the unknown. His acclaimed Septology trilogy, written in Norwegian Nynorsk, explores faith, mortality, and art with the spiritual depth of prayer. Critics see in him shades of Ibsen’s introspection and Derrida’s deconstruction, but his voice is wholly his own.

In an age of noise, Fosse reminds us that literature can whisper. His Nobel wasn’t just a win for Norwegian letters — it was a triumph for stillness.

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When the world felt fractured in 2020, the Nobel Committee chose a poet who had spent a lifetime writing about fracture. Louise Glück, then 77, became only the second woman poet ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — honoured “for her unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”

A professor at Yale, Glück began writing in her teens, finding music in silence and purpose in pain. Her collections — from The Wild Iris to Averno — are spare yet searing, exploring grief, memory, and the slow art of survival. She once wrote,

“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.” Few lines better define her career.

Glück’s poems don’t demand attention; they whisper, then linger. In her economy of language lies abundance — of feeling, of honesty, of the quiet courage to face the self. In celebrating her, the Nobel celebrated solitude itself.

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At 85, Margaret Atwood remains a titan of world literature. From The Handmaid’s Tale to The Testaments, her work continues to shape political and cultural discourse. While she’s won nearly every award imaginable, the Nobel has somehow eluded her.

Bookmakers rank her high again this year, and fans call it poetic justice waiting to happen. Atwood herself laughs off the speculation, but her fingerprints are everywhere: dystopia, feminism, irony, and ecological grief.

Sometimes life keeps the winner from Stockholm. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel in 1970, was barred from leaving the Soviet Union. The author of The Gulag Archipelago, he represented defiance against censorship and tyranny. His acceptance speech, read in his absence, praised literature as “the candle that burns in darkness.”

It wasn’t until 1974 that Solzhenitsyn received his medal, years after exile and persecution. His absence turned the ceremony into a symbol of resistance, proof that literature can outlast oppression. The Nobel, in that moment, was not just a prize, but a protest.

Few Nobel-related feuds are as famous as the cold war between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. When Faulkner was asked about Hemingway’s simple style, he quipped, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway’s reply?

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Decades later, both men won the Nobel — Faulkner in 1950, Hemingway in 1954 — and the rivalry became part of literary folklore. Their contrasting styles still define two poles of American writing: baroque density versus minimalist precision. The Academy, in a way, crowned both, reminding us that literature has room for every kind of genius.

While the Nobel has gone global, some literary powerhouses remain unrecognised. Countries like Egypt (beyond Naguib Mahfouz), South Korea (until Han Kang’s 2024 triumph), and Nigeria (beyond Wole Soyinka) still await their second names. Others such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, have never seen a laureate at all.

Critics argue that the Academy still favours Western languages and literary forms. Yet the rise of global publishing, translation networks, and digital access means change may finally be coming. With powerful voices emerging from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the map of literature is expanding fast.

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer waited decades for the Nobel, finally receiving it in 2011 after a stroke had left him partially paralysed. When the announcement came, he smiled but could not speak. At the ceremony, his wife read his words, and his presence alone moved the audience to tears.

Tranströmer’s minimalist poems had long been admired by writers worldwide. His Nobel felt like a homecoming, a moment when the Academy recognised one of its own.

Some writers wait a lifetime. Johannes V Jensen, the Danish novelist and poet, holds the record for the most nominations — over 50 — before finally winning in 1944. Others, such as Jorge Luis Borges or Chinua Achebe, never saw their names announced at all.

The waiting game is a Nobel tradition in itself.

According to Ladbrokes’ latest odds (updated October 8, 2025), Can Xue and László Krasznahorkai are joint favourites to take home this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature — both sitting at 10/1. It’s a clash of two literary titans: the Chinese avant-garde visionary and the Hungarian master of apocalypse.

Can Xue (real name Deng Xiaohua), 72, is famed for her surreal, dreamlike storytelling — a literary world where reality folds like origami. She’s chasing history as only the third Chinese-born writer to win after Mo Yan (2012) and Gao Xingjian (2000). Krasznahorkai, 71, meanwhile, brings his own brand of slow-burning, dystopian lyricism — his Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance already cult classics.

Trailing just behind at 14/1 is Haruki Murakami, with Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie close at 20/1.

When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he delivered one of the most celebrated speeches in the prize’s history. Speaking from Stockholm, he declared that the writer’s duty was “to write about the human heart in conflict with itself.” In the shadow of the atomic age, Faulkner urged faith in humanity’s endurance.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, he was nominated multiple times but consistently overlooked. When the first Nobel was awarded in 1901, Tolstoy was the clear favourite. Instead, the prize went to French poet Sully Prudhomme, whose name has since faded from public memory.

Tolstoy’s rejection was partly due to politics and partly to his moral radicalism. Late in life, he renounced wealth and fame, living as a peasant and preaching pacifism. Some Academy members viewed him as too subversive, even dangerous.

Few announcements divided opinion like that of 2019, when the Nobel Committee awarded two prizes: one to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and another to Austria’s Peter Handke. Tokarczuk’s win was widely celebrated as her imaginative, boundary-crossing novels resonated globally. Handke’s, however, caused outrage due to his controversial political views and comments on the Yugoslav Wars.

For the first time, the Nobel became a flashpoint for global debate: can we separate art from the artist? The Academy defended its choice, citing literary merit alone. Critics accused it of moral blindness. The uproar forced a reckoning over the subjects of art and autonomy.

Here’s one for the literary detectives. Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel medal was stolen, or so the story goes. Awarded in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway received his Nobel in absentia while recovering from a plane crash in Africa. He later presented the medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba as a gesture of gratitude for the island’s hospitality.

Years later, during political upheaval, the medal mysteriously vanished. Some say it was melted down; others claim it still lies hidden in a church vault. The tale has become literary legend.

Did you know the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature was just 41? Rudyard Kipling, awarded in 1907, remains the youngest laureate in the prize’s 124-year history. The author of The Jungle Book and Kim, Kipling was honoured “for the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.”

Even then, the choice sparked debate. Some critics saw him as too colonial, too close to empire. Others hailed him as a genius who captured the spirit of his time. His youth added to the controversy. Could someone so young already embody literary immortality? A century later, the question lingers, even as his rhythmic storytelling continues to captivate.

Every Nobel season, someone remembers Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine writer reshaped world literature, influencing everyone from Umberto Eco to Salman Rushdie, yet never received the Nobel. Politics played its part, the Academy reportedly found his right-wing sympathies troubling.

Still, Borges’s shadow looms large over every literary shortlist. His metaphysical stories, comprising infinite libraries, circular time, imaginary encyclopedias, changed how we think about fiction itself.

It is October 9, 2025, and the literary world is buzzing and betting. The Nobel Prize in Literature is just hours away. Leading the field is reclusive Australian novelist Gerald Murnane at 6.00, followed closely by Hungary’s labyrinthine storyteller László Krasznahorkai at 7.00, and Mexico’s genre-bending Cristina Rivera Garza at 10.00.

Hot on their heels come heavyweights Anne Carson, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Thomas Pynchon (all at 12.00), while India’s own Amitav Ghosh sits just behind at 13.00.

Further down, dreamers like Can Xue and Michel Houellebecq hover near 15.00, with Murakami, Kincaid, and Rushdie keeping hope alive at 18.00. The list also includes Allende, Ko Un, Margret Atwood and Stephen King (50.00).

(Sourced from NicerOdds)

Enrique Vila-Matas, 76 years
Spain

Vila-Matas delights in dismantling literature from within. His novels, including Bartleby & Co. (2000) and Dublinesque (2010), circle the theme of writers who cannot write, books that cannot be finished, and stories about the impossibility of storytelling. It’s literature about literature, delivered with wit and melancholy. Spain has not had a Nobel since Vargas Llosa in 2010 — Vila-Matas could be the one to end that 15-year gap.

Can Xue, 72 years

China

Odds: 14/1

Can Xue’s radical interiority makes her an unexpected but vital voice on the list. At 14/1, Xue remains the long‑shot, yet the kind of long-shot whose risk feels vital. For years she has loomed in the periphery of Nobel speculations—not for lack of mastery, but because her terrain is so radical: dream-logic, ontological disorientation, radical interiority.

Can Xue’s claim rests on a transgressive reinvention of fiction. Her novels and stories tend to unfold like dreams felt, not explained: voices multiply, settings morph, motifs drift in and out like memories half-remembered. Her experiments with self, language, and the abyss resist stable reading even while they pull the reader deeper into the narrative. To bet on her is to envision a Nobel Prize granted less to narrative comfort and more to imaginative rupture.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Mircea Cărtărescu, 69 years
Romania
Odds: 11/1

At once lyrical and cerebral, Cărtărescu brings scale and soul to postmodern fiction.

Mircea Cărtărescu’s equal stake at 11/1 signals eastern Europe’s claim to the centre. A poet, critic, novelist, he is among Romania’s most ambitious literary craftsmen. Cărtărescu is celebrated for works such as Nostalgia (1989), Blinding (1996), and Solenoid (2015), where multilayered narrative, lyrical intensity, and metaphoric density intersect. He weaves mythic resonances into everyday detail, collapsing the borders of fantastic and real. At his best, he offers not only spectacle, but a sustained inner life – characters as consciousness rather than protagonists. His artistry lies in generosity – even as he builds labyrinths, he refuses to close the doors.

Cărtărescu’s prose is not minimalist. He invites his reader into dream‑cathedrals of consciousness, where metaphor is architecture and imagination is subterranean geography. A nod to him is, in a way, a promise: that literature can remain as audacious as it is humane.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Cristina Rivera Garza, 61 years
Mexico
Odds: 9/1

The Mexican writer's blend of archive, fiction, and memory positions her at the literary edge. With odds of 9/1, Rivera Garza is a dark horse, a writer whose territory is border, rupture, and spectral presence. Her presence on the list is itself a kind of claim for literature to reckon with the margins, with absence, with lives unrecorded and suggests a willingness to engage with voices forged in the interstices of history.

Rivera Garza’s distinction comes from a restless hybridity. She moves fluently among genres—fiction, autobiography, essay, archival excavation—blurring boundaries. In works like The Iliac Crest (2002), Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021), and her numerous bilingual or translingual texts, she confronts disappearance, violence, and identity with an interrogative edge. She crafts narrators who press against gaps in memory, whose subjectivity is porous, haunted, mutable. Her language is precise, unsettling, intimate, an artistry born of disjunction — she fragments, parries, elides, and in that space we feel the strain of history itself.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Gerald Murnane, 86 years

Australia

Odds: 5/1

The reclusive Australian novelist leads the betting with his meditative, metafictional landscapes and radical inwardness.

With odds of 5/1 at NicerOdds, Murnane stands as the bookmakers’ favourite, signalling both respect and the audacity of quiet ambition. A writer who inhabits the contours of memory, perception, and the limits of the self, Murnane’s artistry is in his resolute refusal to adhere to conventional narratives. His early novel, The Plains (1982), became a cultural touchstone, buoyed less by plot and more by a language astute in capturing the contours of absence.

Successive works deepened a labyrinth of recurring motifs — horse racing, stained glass, boundary lines. His sentences often fold into themselves; his fictional worlds overlap with his archival preoccupations. In that space, he conjures a literature of interior geography where the external landscape is subsidiary.

From The Plains to Inland (1988) to Border Districts (2017), his work burrows into landscapes both actual and mental, turning flat expanses into sites of metaphysical weight. In his hands, literature is not spectacle but excavation, a patient inquiry into what cannot be said directly. Could the quiet man from the tiny town of Goroke in Victoria, who has never boarded a plane or owned a camera, really make it to literature’s highest honour?

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Though the Nobel is awarded annually, there have been years when no writer was deemed worthy, or when war made awarding impossible. The prize was suspended in 1914, 1918, and from 1940 to 1943 due to the World Wars. In 1935, it was withheld because, according to the Academy, “no suitable living candidate” was found.

Not every writer dreams of winning the Nobel. In fact, two of the 20th century’s greatest figures — Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak — famously refused it. Sartre, awarded in 1964, rejected the prize as a protest against institutional authority, declaring that a writer “must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.” Pasternak’s refusal in 1958, by contrast, was coerced. The Soviet government forced him to decline the award for Doctor Zhivago, banned in his homeland. His acceptance would have endangered his life and family.

These refusals remain part of Nobel lore. Sartre’s medal was never minted; Pasternak’s was later collected by his son in 1989.

Few realise that behind many Nobel winners stand translators who make their work accessible to the committee. The Swedish Academy reads widely, but not all members read every language. For contenders writing in Arabic, Japanese, or Swahili, translators become their unseen champions. Often, a brilliant translation can mean the difference between obscurity and recognition.

Take the case of Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali reached Stockholm through an English version edited by W.B. Yeats. Without that translation, Tagore’s luminous verses might never have crossed linguistic borders.

Also Read: Tagore and Yeats: How a Nobel-winning friendship fell apart

Welcome, readers! It is that time of year again, when bookmakers, critics, and literature lovers around the world hold their breath, waiting for the Swedish Academy to reveal who will join the storied list of Nobel laureates. The Nobel Prize in Literature, established in 1901, has honoured some of the greatest voices of our times — from Rabindranath Tagore and Toni Morrison to Svetlana Alexievich and Jon Fosse. But the prize is also famous for its surprises. Will the Academy reward a perennial favourite at last, or spotlight a lesser-known name that changes how we see literature itself? Stay with us as we track contenders, odds, history, and all the live drama.