László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel prize in literature 2025

The Nobel prize in literature for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy has announced.

- BY EMMA LOFFHAGEN The Guardian

The academy cited the 71-year-old’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

Krasznahorkai is known for his dystopian, melancholic novels, which have won numerous prizes, including the 2019 National Book award for translated literature and the 2015 International Booker prize. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been adapted into feature films.

“I am deeply glad that I have received the Nobel prize — above all because this award proves that literature exists in itself, beyond various nonliterary expectations, and that it is still being read,” said Krasznahorkai. “And for those who read it, it offers a certain hope that beauty, nobility, and the sublime still exist for their own sake. It may offer hope even to those in whom life itself only barely flickers.”

The novelist Colm Tóibin described Krasznahorkai as “a unique literary visionary who has opened up a huge amount of rich space in the contemporary novel showing what can be done”.

“Krasznahorkai richly deserves the prize,” said the novelist Hari Kunzru. “He has a reputation as an austere figure of European high culture, and indeed some of his work is uncompromisingly bleak and difficult, but he’s also a curious, playful and very funny writer. When I read him, I feel fortified, both as a human being and as someone who’s trying to make art. He shows me what's possible.”