Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Nobel Committee announced yesterday.

The committee chose to honor Krasznahorkai (71 years old) “for his stunning body of work that reaffirms the power of art amid a terror close to the end of the world.” The committee’s statement described Krasznahorkai as “a great epic writer belonging to the Central European tradition extending from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, characterized by absurdity and comic exaggeration,” adding, “But there is more than one facet to his work, as he also looks eastward, adopting a more contemplative and delicate tone in his expressions.”

Krasznahorkai is distinguished by a unique linguistic style based on long flowing sentences and dense narrative structure, combining philosophical reflection, symbolism, and a metaphysical anxious tone. His works often deal with the collapse of the modern world, the absurdity of human existence, and the search for salvation in a dark reality where chaos intertwines with spiritual grandeur.

His first notable novel was “The End of the National Narrative” in 1985, but his global fame was cemented by his novel “The Devil’s Tango,” which was later adapted into a film directed by the great Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr in 1994, considered a masterpiece of avant-garde cinema. Krasznahorkai and Tarr collaborated on other films, such as “The Turin Horse” in 2011, for which Krasznahorkai wrote the literary text the film was based on.

Other prominent works include the novels “The White King,” “War and War,” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” which won the International Booker Prize for translated literature in 2015.

His works have been translated into several languages and enjoy wide critical attention for their intellectual depth and exceptional linguistic beauty. Krasznahorkai is compared to literary giants like Kafka and Dostoevsky for his cosmic pessimism and complex philosophical vision revealing human fragility in the face of harsh existence and the irony of fate.

The writer himself described his difficult style as reflecting “contemplation of reality to the point of madness,” and he has been called “obsessive” due to his tendency to write long sentences and rarely-ending paragraphs.

Krasznahorkai was born on January 5, 1954, in Gyula in southeastern Hungary. His books attract readers especially in Germany, where he lived for years, and in Hungary, where he is considered one of the greatest living writers of the country.