Susan Sontang defined him as “Master of the Apocalypse” and today the Swedish Academy awarded him the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his compelling and visionary work which, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. The Hungarian László Krasznahorkai in his books, marked by emptiness and expectations, suspensions and returns and the tearing tensions set in the muddy Hungarian countryside of his debut novel Satantango up to Melancholia of resistance, or War and war brings hopes and fears and the slow social and material degradation of a world that always seems to be waiting for something that never arrives. A change in which he is the first not to believe, bringing into his books the creative yet desperate power of that Central European literature that extends from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard. And like these writers, Krasznahorkai tells everything in detail, facts and people, “examining – to use his words – reality to the limit of madness”, to captivate us with the tension of the progression of events and the thoughts of his characters, but the strength of the novel is in the language, in proceeding over very long periods, all subordinate, in a magmatic, slow lava flow of words, of sentences that envelop and capture with their meticulousness of details and visionary strength, in a hypnotic progression that knows no pauses from start to finish.
He was born in 1954 in Gyula, in south-eastern Hungary, near the border with Romania, a remote rural area, marked by desolation, not only physical, which often returns in his books. He is the author of novels and collections of short stories with which he has won everything, from the International Man Booker Prize in 2015, to the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 and now the Nobel Prize, finalist for the Gregor Von Rezzori Prize and the European Strega Prize 2017. Contrary to what usually happens, this time the winner of the prestigious award, which will be awarded to him on 10 December, is someone writer who has been listed among those eligible for candidacy for years. In Italy his works are published by Bompiani starting from his debut novel Satantango, which bore the Kafkaesque motto in its epigraph, «In that case, I will miss the thing waiting for it». The novel was turned into a very original film in 1994 in collaboration with director Béla Tarr and immediately brought him popularity. in 1998 Melancolia della resistance followed, a horror fantasy that borders on the grotesque with the story of the circus and the stuffed whale. If The Return of Baron Wenckheim is still a Hungarian setting in War and War, from its remote province we reach New York through time and space, where the writer’s typical brutality and beauty returns forcefully. With Seiobo’s stories it came down here, the writer investigates art and here he also makes an incursion into Italy from Perugino’s Florence to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. He is so convinced that the strength of art and beauty is capable of defeating the darkness of the world. “What is happening in Ukraine makes us think that we are faced with a situation in which greater force will win over lesser force,” he said in an interview with ANSA on the occasion of Libri come. «However, in my opinion, towards any destructive force the only way to fight it is the weakness of kindness». His next novel, Panino is no longer there, will be released in Italy by Bompiani in 2026.