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Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature
Last year, the coveted prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang

Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

Oct 09, 2025
04:31 pm

What's the story

Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the prize "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." Last year, the coveted prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." Between 1901 and 2024, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded 117 times to 121 Nobel laureates.

Who is

Great epic writer in the Central European tradition

Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the little town of Gyula, in southeast Hungary, close to the Romanian border. Krasznahorkai's debut novel, 'Sátántangó,' published in 1985 and set in a similar distant rural setting, became a literary phenomenon in Hungary and the author's breakout work. The Nobel Prize page describes him as a "great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess."

Prizes

Won many prizes

His dystopian, melancholic novels have won him numerous prizes, including the 2019 National Book Award for translated literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Several of his novels, notably Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been made into feature films. Herscht 07769, first published in 2021, has been described as a remarkable contemporary German novel due to its accuracy in depicting the country's societal instability.

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More on Krasznahorkai's literary world

Announcement schedule

Schedule for the rest of the prizes

The prestigious awards, established by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in the 19th century, honor remarkable contributions in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics, and peace. The winners will join a distinguished list of laureates, including Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa. Each prize carries an award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million), along with an 18-carat gold medal and diploma for winners. The awards will be handed out on December 10 on the anniversary of Nobel's death.

Prizes

Nobel Prize winners so far

This year, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics were John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit." The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M Yaghi "for the development of metal-organic frameworks." Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance."