'Master Of Apocalypse': All About Laszlo Krasznahorkai — Recipient Of 2025 Nobel Prize In Literature
His first 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.

Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The writer will receive a 11-million-krona ($1.2 million) award, the Swedish Academy said in a statement on Thursday.
Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess.
Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border. He has used a similar remote rural area as the scene of his first novel ‘Sátántangó’, published in 1985, which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work.
His first 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 American critic Susan Sontag had crowned Krasznahorkai contemporary literature's "master of the apocalypse", after reading the author's second book Az ellenállás melankóliája (1989; The Melancholy of Resistance, 1998).
This horror fantasy also plays out in a small Hungarian town nestled in a Carpathian valley. Crucial to the dramatic sequence of events is the arrival in the city of a ghostly circus, whose main attraction is the carcass of a giant whale.
Employing dreamlike scenes and grotesque characterisations, László Krasznahorkai masterfully portrays the brutal struggle between order and disorder. None may escape the effects of terror.
In the novel Háború és háború (1999; War & War, 2006), Krasznahorkai shifts his attention beyond the borders of his Hungarian homeland in allowing the humble archivist Korin to decide, as his life’s final act, to travel from the outskirts of Budapest to New York such that he might, for a moment, take his place at the centre of the world.
Herscht 07769 that was released last year has been described as a great contemporary German novel, on account of its accuracy in portraying the country’s social unrest.
About the search for a secret garden, his 2003 novel Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó (A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, 2022) is a mysterious tale with powerful lyrical sections that takes place southeast of Kyoto.