Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist whose sentences run for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
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.
Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. Although Krasznahorkai published “The Melancholy of Resistance” in Hungarian in 1989, it did not appear in English translation until 1998. The novel, which consists of just one sentence over more than 300 pages, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.
His latest work to appear in English is “Herscht 07769,” published last year in the United States. The novel, which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction, features only one period in its 400 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.”
Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerfully, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel.
“It is Krasznahorkai’s artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the academy to award the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.
Krasznahorkai was born in Communist Hungary in 1954 into a Jewish family in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry.
After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including playing piano in a jazz band — and studied Hungarian literature in Budapest.
Krasznahorkai’s literary breakthrough came with his 1985 debut novel, “Satantango,” about a life in a poor hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. (Tarr also filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994.)
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.
Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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