Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: When the Swedish Academy announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature would go to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to many it felt like the felt like the completion of a sentence decades in the making. For readers of this Hungarian novelist, who was hailed by Susan Sontag as “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse” and by W G Sebald as a writer whose universality “rivals Gogol’s Dead Souls”—the award recognised not only a singular prose style but a radical faith in art’s ability to hold chaos together, even if just by a comma. The slow dance of the apocalypse Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai worked as an editor before turning to fiction in the early 1980s. His debut, Satantango (1985), introduced a world both provincial and apocalyptic: a rain-soaked village of con artists and drunks clinging to rumor and delusion. The book—adapted by filmmaker Béla Tarr into a seven-hour black-and-white film—announced Krasznahorkai’s signature qualities, which include vast single sentences, a tone oscillating between cosmic comedy and despair, and a fascination with people teetering on the edge of dissolution. The novels that followed —The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War & War (1999), and Seiobo There Below (2008)—expanded that apocalypse to metaphysical scale. “Violence soon erupts,” the 2015 Man Booker judges wrote of The Melancholy of Resistance, “and the book as a whole could be described as a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilization.” Krasznahorkai’s work resists the consolations of narrative. Plot, when it appears, is often swallowed by syntax: long, unbroken clauses that mimic obsessive thought. In War & War, a minor archivist discovers a mysterious manuscript and flees to New York to post it online before killing himself, a premonition, perhaps, of our digital yearning to preserve meaning as the world disintegrates. In Seiobo There Below, perfection is glimpsed in flashes, a Buddha restored, a heron hunting, a Noh actor rehearsing. However, it always dissolves into impermanence. Between the comic and the tragic Krasznahorkai’s fiction is as bleak as it is funny. His characters’ monologues, like Beckett’s, spiral into absurdity. Their despair is often indistinguishable from slapstick. “Dance is my one weakness,” says Mrs Schmidt in Satantango, tipsily justifying the village’s drunken dance of death. In Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016), a washed-up nobleman returns to his hometown, igniting chaos among gossiping townsfolk and a mad philosopher raving about being and nothingness. Critics called it “majestic” and “deeply funny,” the “culminating work of an extraordinary career.” Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is worldly, toxic, and oddly comic. As The Baffler observed, it’s “his . longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel—suffused with nihilism, but deeply funny.” This mingling of doom and laughter defines Krasznahorkai’s vision, which constitutes endurance through absurdity, not escapism. The Booker and beyond Krasznahorkai’s international stature solidified with the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, honouring his body of work rather than a single book. His translators, chiefly George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, were essential collaborators, converting the hypnotic flow of his Hungarian into English without breaking its rhythm. “He is a master of peripatetic, never-ending sentences that brim with vacillations, qualifications, and false epiphanies,” wrote the Hudson Review. By the time he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, his oeuvre spanned four decades and genres, from the visual-musical experiment of Chasing Homer (accompanied by percussive compositions and Max Neumann’s paintings) to the meditative stillness of A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (a prose poem of pure contemplation). His later novel Herscht 07769 (2024), written “in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding,” depicts neo-Nazis, wolves, and a hapless physics student, an allegory of moral paralysis in contemporary Europe. Themes of despair and transcendence Across his labyrinthine sentences, Krasznahorkai circles the same obsessions: entropy, the futility of systems, and the elusive possibility of grace. His landscapes, whether a Hungarian village, a Japanese monastery, or New York’s Bowery, are metaphysical theaters where human delusion meets divine silence. In his universe, apocalypse is less an event than a condition: the slow, daily unraveling of meaning. Yet beneath the pessimism lies something like faith. As his Seiobo There Below reminds us, beauty, even if fleeting, “reflects the sacred, even if we are mostly unable to bear it.” It is this paradox—despair yoked to awe—that makes Krasznahorkai the rare novelist whose pessimism redeems.
