In Stockholm, on October 9, 2025, the Swedish Academy awards László Krasznahorkai the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Hungarian writer, a major figure in Hungarian and Central European literature, is praised for a visionary body of work. The threat of disaster sharpens the power of art, highlighting a unique universe. Indeed, this universe is composed of long, flowing sentences and tenacious visions. It reminds us how literature can still stand up to the noise of the world.
In Stockholm, the Academy crowns Krasznahorkai: announcement, endowment, and precedents
In Stockholm, in the Börssalen hall, the Swedish Academy announced on October 9, 2025, at 1:00 PM CEST the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to László Krasznahorkai, praising "his fascinating and visionary work that, amidst apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." The award will be officially presented during the Nobel ceremonies on December 10, 2025. The indicated endowment amounts to 11 million Swedish kronor, or about 1 million euros. After Imre Kertész in 2002, Hungary now has a second laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Last year, the prize was awarded to Han Kang.
A writer of Central European literature with a long breath
Born in 1954 in Gyula, Krasznahorkai has crafted a body of work inhabited by fear and grace. His sentences stretch like rivers, sinuous, with a musicality reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard‘s rhythmic obsession. Moreover, this musicality also evokes the metaphysical persistence of Franz Kafka, according to critics. For him, catastrophe is not a mere backdrop. It is a climate, sometimes a slow tide that engulfs villages, bodies, and consciences. From novel to novel, the writer pushes his characters to the brink. However, he leaves them a fragile rope at the moment of the leap: art. This ability to invent a form prevents succumbing to dissolution.
He made his mark as early as 1985 with the novel Sátántangó), a chronicle of a community in decline, later adapted into a film by Béla Tarr. Subsequent books, from The Melancholy of Resistance to War & War, have extended this mental territory. In this universe, everything seems to collapse, except for an almost ascetic demand. This demand is for precision and ear. Contrary to verbose storytelling, Krasznahorkai holds the reader in a clear hypnosis: the scene seems motionless, but the pressure increases, and one senses beneath each sentence the rumble of a world on the verge of tipping over.
Sátántangó, an anxious matrix and cinema of astonishment
The core of the work, Sátántangó concentrates the initial shockwave. A novel of circular movement, it tames chaos and opens, with Béla Tarr, the way to a limit experience in cinema.
The Nobel consecrates a literature that watches when everything wavers. In cinema, Béla Tarr, the writer’s accomplice, has turned it into a limit experience: seven and a half hours of shots that breathe like storm lungs. The collaboration continued with Werckmeister Harmonies, which the text The Melancholy of Resistance irrigates from start to finish. Krasznahorkai does not just get adapted; he works cinema from the inside, dialogues with the image material, as if the prose, in places, sought another body to extend its own vertigo.
On screen, gray cities and wind-swept plains create a cosmogony of exhaustion. Crowds on the brink of riot add to this cosmogony. In the books, similar motifs return but are reoriented by the voice. Wandering, rumor, and the announcement of a false savior are part of it. The astonishment of the crowds is also present. This stubborn crackling of consciousness refuses abdication. The Swedish Academy today salutes this work of undermining and relaunching. This face-to-face with the apocalypse is not complacency. It is rather a method to make beauty still possible.
The French translation, a patient fidelity
In France, the work exists thanks to the constancy of Joëlle Dufeuilly, a translator attentive to momentum and syntax, who has rendered into French Seiobo There Below, North by a Mountain. South by a Lake. West by Roads. East by a River., War & War, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, published by Cambourakis editions. Francophone readers, long a minority but fervent, have built around these books a community of listening: they read aloud to hold the breath, they return to verify the passage from one cadence to another, they seek that thin film of grace that, in Krasznahorkai, surfaces even in disaster.
The translation has not simplified the work. It has accompanied it, in its length, its grain, its unusual brilliance. In France, the reception has broadened over the years, carried by cinephiles who came from the side of Béla Tarr and who often retraced their steps to the books. This porosity between the arts is one of the novelist’s singularities: he is part of a Central European tradition but allows himself to be traversed by painting, music, architecture, and the arts of Asia that he has frequented and meditated on.
A style of duration and obsession
He has been called "the master of the apocalypse", according to the now proverbial formula. The cliché would hold if one missed the rest: the discreet comedy that, in his work, cracks the tragic poses, the sudden tenderness for the weak, the failures, the dreamers; the rigor finally, which bends the narrative material to asceticism. The long sentences are not a tic; they are vision machines. They teach the reader to inhabit time as an expanse. They encourage noticing the inflection of a glow on a tile. Thus, they allow one to sense what shifts in a barely more pronounced breath.
From The Melancholy of Resistance to Baron Wenckheim, Krasznahorkai orchestrates true narrative fugues. A motif appears, interrupts, returns, transforms, gains density. The world, in his work, holds to a grave pedal that the prose never releases. Everything is threatened, yet art emerges and saves what can be saved: a look, a light, a sentence that, emerging from the dark, still stands.
Why the Academy chose Krasznahorkai
According to the Swedish Academy, the writer is celebrated for an "epic and visionary work." This work reaffirms, at the heart of apocalyptic terror, the power of art. One understands the jurors’ intuition: in an era of climate anxiety, democratic crises, and saturated information systems, Krasznahorkai‘s literature offers not a commentary but an experience of lucidity. It teaches to see for a long time, not to turn away, to rediscover presence in the insistent description of reality.
This choice is part of a long history: that of a prize that alternately looks at modernity and tradition. In 2002, Imre Kertész offered a Hungarian anchor point. In 2024, Han Kang shifted the focus to South Korea. In 2025, the Swedish Academy turns to Central Europe, an interior continent where history has often cut through lives. Moreover, this continent has saturated memory.
Calendar and protocol
The literature prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, which is based in Stockholm. Furthermore, this institution has eighteen lifetime members. Preparatory work is carried out by the Nobel Committee for Literature. This committee examines a shortlist of candidates in the spring before submitting names for the final vote. The public announcement of the literature category traditionally takes place at 1:00 PM in Stockholm. The official presentation will take place, as usual, on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel.
For this 2025 edition, the endowment reaches 11 million Swedish kronor per prize, confirming the renewed generosity of the Nobel Foundation. The laureates receive a medal, a diploma, and a check during an annual ceremony. Moreover, this ceremony adjusts its decorum to the happy gravity of the moment.
French news: publications, scenes, and readers
In recent years, several major titles have been published or republished in French. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming has marked a broader readership, reminding that beyond darkness, Krasznahorkai knows how to create clarity, sometimes bursts of irony. Seiobo There Below, a shore book where art confronts destruction, has confirmed the novelist’s attraction to Japanese tradition, sculpture, painting, and liturgies that give shape to the world. French bookstores tell a similar story: from reader to reader, the work has gained a singular place. Indeed, through recommendations and public readings, it often remains on the margins of the mainstream market. However, it is at the center of a conversation.
In cinema halls, the fidelity to the companionship with Béla Tarr has never waned. Image and text, in these two, support each other without merging. The black and white of Werckmeister Harmonies extends the prose as a sensory experience. The Hungarian writer has lived in Berlin, traveled to China and Japan. Moreover, he has long remained outside the French literary capitals. However, he now arrives at the full visibility that many imagined without really expecting.
A novelist for stormy times
There is an obstinacy in Krasznahorkai: looking longer than fear. The modern world has its algorithmic delusions, its idols of speed, its promises of oblivion. The writer opposes an active slowness, an art of duration that thwarts dizziness. Terror passes, but the sentence remains. It orders the rumor and finds, in the detail of a gesture, the measure of a tenacious humanity. One emerges from these books as from a long night: the pupils adjust, the air seems colder, but one breathes better.
The Nobel confirms this discreet power. It reminds us that at the heart of troubled times, literature remains a method of knowledge. It does not console, it does not preach. It unfolds. It makes audible what, without it, would dissolve in noise. And if the Academy today salutes this work of vigilance, it is perhaps because there was an urgency to recognize. Under the shadow, this silent light does not go out.
Awaiting Stockholm: rereading the work, experiencing the courage of art
On December 10, Stockholm will gather the laureates for the award ceremony. Until then, we will reread Sátántangó following the march of a weary village, we will enter Seiobo There Below to experience, scene after scene, the patience of the artistic gesture, we will return to War & War as one approaches an icon. There is no moral in these stories. There is a rhythm. There are bodies. Above all, there is this conviction that art is not a refuge, but a form of courage.
