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The Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (1954), “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, amid apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

László Krasznahorkai is one of the great epic writers of the Central European tradition that stretches from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, defined by absurdism and grotesque exaggeration. Yet his work also reaches beyond this lineage. Turning his gaze eastward, Krasznahorkai embraces a more meditative, finely tuned tone.

Born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border, Krasznahorkai was soon hailed by American critic Susan Sontag as contemporary literature’s “master of the apocalypse”—a verdict she reached after reading his second novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989).

In War & War (1999), he extends his vision beyond Hungary’s borders: the humble archivist Korin resolves, as his final act, to leave the outskirts of Budapest for New York, determined to stand—if only for a moment—at the center of the world.

Krasznahorkai’s later works reflect his encounters with the East, shaped by his travels in China and Japan, where he found inspiration for a more introspective and spiritually charged mode of writing.