"You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society." - László Krasznahorkai in "The Melancholy of Resistance"
László Krasznahorkai (born in 1954 in Gyula, Hungary) is the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. He writes in the tradition of European modernism. Master of the absurd and the grotesque, Krasznahorkai is often compared to Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. After having read "The Melancholy of Resistance" in 1989, American writer Susan Sonntag called Krasznahorkai the "Hungarian master of the apocalypse".
Krasznahorkai received numerous literary awards including the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. He is best known for such novels as the "Satantango" (Sátántangó), "Melancholy of Resistance", "Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming", "Seiobo There Below" and the "Herscht 07769". His works have been translated into forty languages.
The author received the good news from the Swedish Academy while in Frankfurt, Germany. He admitted that he did not expect the Nobel Prize but stated that he was very happy and very proud to be in a line that includes so many truly great writers and poets.