'Master of apocalypse' best writer

Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday, has been described as the postmodern “master of the apocalypse”.

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“He is a hypnotic writer,” Krasznahorkai’s English language translator, the poet George Szirtes, said.

“He draws you in until the world he conjures echoes and echoes inside you, until it’s your own vision of order and chaos.”

Until now, the late Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz was the only Hungarian to win the Nobel Literature Prize. In 2002, she was honoured “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

Born in Gyula, a small town in southeast Hungary in 1954, Krasznahorkai, now 71, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family.