Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai yesterday won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art,” the award-giving body said.
“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Swedish Academy said in a statement. “But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”
The second Hungarian to win the prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border.
Photo: EPA
His breakthrough 1985 novel, Satantango, is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary.
“The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism,” the academy said.
Krasznahorkai had a close creative partnership with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Several of his works have been adapted into films by Tarr, including Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.
Their collaboration has garnered critical acclaim. In 1993, he received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy of Resistance.
Past winners of the 11 million kronor (US$1.2 million) literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who bagged the first award, American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner in 1949, former British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1953, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and Norway’s Jon Fosse in 2023.
Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang who became the 18th woman — the first was Swedish author Selma Lagerlof in 1909 — and the first South Korean to receive the award.
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