STOCKHOLM (AP) — Hungarian author László Krasznahorkaj’s philosophical, darkly funny novels often unfold in one sentence. nobel prize He won a literary award on Thursday for his “compelling and visionary work that reminds us of the power of art in the midst of apocalyptic fear.”
Several of his works, including his debut films “Satan Tango” and “The Melancholy of Resistance,” were made into films by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.
Steve Sem Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize Jury, said at the presentation that the Nobel Prize jurors praised his “absence of illusions and his artistic eye for seeing the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art.”
“László Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition, from Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, characterized by absurdity and grotesque excess,” the Nobel Prize jury said.
Other books include “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a surreal and disturbing story set in a small Hungarian town, and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” an epic tale of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.
He has also written several books inspired by his travels to China and Japan, including A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, published in Hungarian in 2003.
Sem Sandberg said Krasznahorkai had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for some time, adding: “He wrote and produced one outstanding work after another.” He called his literary output “almost half a century of pure excellence.”
A response from Krasznahorkai, 71, was not immediately available. He did not speak at the announcement.
He was born in Gyura, a city in southeastern Hungary near the Romanian border. Throughout the 1970s, he studied law at universities in Szeged and Budapest, before shifting his focus to literature. According to the bio section of his website, he has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and has lived in various countries.
Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, particularly his government’s lack of support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. “How can a country remain neutral when Russia invades its neighbor?” he said in an interview with the Yale Review earlier this year.
However, Prime Minister Orbán was quick to congratulate the author in a Facebook post: “Congratulations to László Krasznahorkaj, the pride of Hungary and the first Nobel laureate from the Gyura!”
Krasznahorkai has won many awards, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Judge Booker praised his “extraordinary prose, incredible length, and switching from solemn demeanor to reckless demeanor to quizzical demeanor to bleak demeanor as he progresses along his wayward path.”
In 2019, he won the American Book Award for Translated Literature for “The Homecoming of Baron Wenkheim.”
American author and critic Susan Sontag described Krasznahorkai as “a modern master of the apocalypse.” He was also friends with American poet and author Allen Ginsberg, and regularly stayed at Ginsberg’s apartment while visiting New York City.
Sem-Sandberg said that Krasznahorkai “has an extraordinary ability to make his world, his literary world, real. That means you are placed in the middle of everything that happens around you, which is a great advantage. Very few writers are able to do that.”
He is the first Hungarian recipient of the award since Imre Kertesz in 2002. He joins an illustrious list of honorees including: Ernest HemingwayToni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee has awarded the Prize for Literature 117 times to a total of 121 recipients. Last year’s award went to a Korean writer. Han Gang The commission said her body of work “confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”
The literature prize is the fourth after the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, which will be announced this week. medicine, physics and chemistry.
The Nobel Peace Prize winners will be announced on Friday. The final Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize in Economics, will be announced on Monday.
The Nobel Prize ceremony will be held on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish businessman and the inventor of dynamite. the person who created the award.
Each award will receive 11 million Swedish krona (approximately $1.2 million), and the winner will also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a certificate.
___
Mike Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Jill Lawless reported from London. Justin Spike contributed to this report from Budapest, Hungary.
