Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”, according to the Swedish Academy, which organises the prize.
Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, is known for novels featuring lengthy sentences and dark subjects. Susan Sontag once called him a “master of the apocalypse”, and the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr has adapted several of his novels for the screen.
Among his best-known works are The Melancholy of Resistance, about events in a small town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow, and Herscht 07769, which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction.
Much of Krasznahorkai’s fiction is written in sentences that span several pages — a habit shared with Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who received the Nobel in 2023. The Melancholy of Resistance, which was first published in Hungarian in 1989, consists of just one sentence over more than 300 pages.
Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”
Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel.
“It is Krasznahorkai’s artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the academy to award the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.
Krasznahorkai was born in Communist Hungary in 1954 into a Jewish family in Gyula, a small town about 190km from Budapest. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry.
After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including playing piano in a jazz band — and studied Hungarian literature in Budapest.
Krasznahorkai’s literary breakthrough came with his 1985 debut novel, Satantango, about a life in a poor hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. (Tarr also filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994.)
In recent decades, he has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man
Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire
body of work rather than a specific novel.
Marina Warner, the chair of that year’s judging panel, told reporters that Krasznahorkai was “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic and often shatteringly beautiful”.
The Swedish Academy has tried in recent years to expand the diversity of authors awarded the prize, having faced criticism that the vast majority of laureates were men from North America or Europe.
Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favourites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.
New York Times News Service