The Nobel Prize has announced the 2025 laureate in literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 has been awarded to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. The announcement was made during the live-streamed ceremony on the Nobel Prize website.

The award was given “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

“László 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. But there are more strings to his bow, and he soon looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone,”

— reads the statement on the Nobel Prize website.

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer and winner of the 2015 International Booker Prize. He studied law in Szeged and Budapest, and in 1983 graduated from the Faculty of Art History at the University of Budapest, with a thesis on the works of Sándor Márai in exile.

He has traveled extensively: visiting Mongolia and China in 1990, crossing the Atlantic in 1992, traveling across Europe and the U.S. (1992–1998), Bosnia (1996), and Japan (1997, 2000, 2005).

His first publication appeared in 1977. Krasznahorkai’s novels and stories are dystopian parables about the grotesque existence of people in a world isolated from external connections and deprived of meaningful prospects.

The writer actively collaborates with film director Béla Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels, stories, and screenplays into films.

On the international market, the rights to Krasznahorkai’s works are represented by Laurence Laluyax of the London-based agency Rogers, Coleridge & White. 

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The Ukrainian translation of Krasznahorkai’s novel “The Melancholy of Resistance” will be published by Komora Publishing House in the fall of 2025. None of his other works have yet been translated into Ukrainian.

“The events of the novel take place in a provincial Hungarian town where a circus arrives with a mysterious show that becomes the catalyst for chaos in society. The main characters each try, in their own way, to resist the oppressive forces threatening their world, allowing the author to explore human helplessness and the collapse of familiar order, touching on deep philosophical and existential questions such as the finiteness of all existence,”

— reads the book’s synopsis.

In 1993, “The Melancholy of Resistance” was named Germany’s Best Book of the Year by the Bestenliste-Preis.

The most recent laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature include:

• 2019 — Austrian writer Peter Handke
• 2020 — American poet Louise Glück
• 2021 — British-Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah
• 2022 — French writer Annie Ernaux
• 2023 — Norwegian writer Jon Fosse
• 2024 — South Korean writer Han Kang

Images: Chytomo, nobelprize.org

Copy editing: Ben Angel