Nobel Prize for Literature 2025: László Krasznahorkai’s grand tales of alienation speak to our times

Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to László Krasznahorkai on October 9, the Swedish Academy commended the author’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry.

The books

Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man.

This book established the coordinates for the subsequent series of ambitious novels that cemented Krasznahorkai’s status as one of the great contemporary global writers.

The Melancholy of Resistance (2019) features a mysterious, charismatic figure, the Prince, who brings a rebellious carnival to a small community and tears it apart. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016) tells of an eccentric aristocrat returning to Hungary after exile in Argentina.

He is greeted by the townspeople as a great benefactor who will enrich the town. Little do they know he has returned saddled with a crippling gambling debt.

The 2014 work Herscht 07769 centres on a baker...

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