A total picture of our human world: Revelations in Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai’s writings

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai was published by the journal Almost Island in 2008 and 2013. He was a guest at the Almost Island Dialogues held in 2013, in New Delhi, where he delivered a talk and a reading from his work. Sharmistha Mohanty, founder-editor of Almost Island, interviewed Krasznahorkai in Budapest in 2012, and had several conversations with him in New Delhi afterwards.

László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been called a master of the apocalypse, of dystopia and devastation. His work refracts not only the darkness of a brutal, desperate world, as seen in the small towns and rural areas of Hungary, but also the few attempts at transcendence that this world holds. His first work was Satantango, a moving and disturbing portrayal of a desolate village moving towards its destruction. Over the years, he has travelled from the dystopian to looking at a complex, nuanced beauty in books like Seiobo There Below, and the meditative and serene A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East.

Krasznahorkai stands with the great innovators of literature who opened up and changed the course of the novel, taking it away from traditional realism towards individual...

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