Laszlo Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art,” according to the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize.
The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan.
Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, is known for novels featuring lengthy sentences and dark subjects. Susan Sontag once called him a “master of the apocalypse,” and the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr has adapted several of his novels for the screen.
Among his best-known works are “The Melancholy of Resistance,” about events in a small town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow, and “Herscht 07769,” which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction.
Much of Krasznahorkai’s fiction is written in sentences that span several pages — a habit shared with Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who received the Nobel in 2023. “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which was first published in Hungarian in 1989, consists of just one sentence over more than 300 pages.
Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”
Krasznahorkai, who was born in Communist Hungary in 1954, made his breakthrough with his 1985 debut novel, “Satantango,” about a life in a poor hamlet.
In recent decades, he has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.
Marina Warner, the chair of that year’s judging panel, told reporters that Krasznahorkai was “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic and often shatteringly beautiful.”
The Swedish Academy has tried in recent years to expand the diversity of authors awarded the prize, having faced criticism that the vast majority of laureates were men from North America or Europe.
Last year’s recipient was Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for “The Vegetarian,” a surreal novel about a woman who stops eating and tries to live off sunlight.
Other recent laureates have included Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian author whose novels dissect the immigrant experience and legacies of colonialism, and Annie Ernaux, a French writer whose books details moments from her life, whether everyday or traumatic.
Before Thursday’s announcement, a British bookmaker had listed the favorites for this year’s prize as Krasznahorkai and Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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