Magyar Author László Krasznahorkai Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Hungarian writer has received the Nobel Prize in Literary Arts.

The Magyar author was honored "for his compelling and prophetic oeuvre that, amidst apocalyptic dread, asserts the strength of literature."

The author has produced five works of fiction and won numerous further writing honors, such as the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, and the 2013's best rendered book prize in Narrative for his first book Satantango, a avant-garde piece regarding the end of the planet.

The writer is the next Hungarian writer to pick up the award following the former Imre Kertesz, who won in 2002.

Born in 1954, Krasznahorkai obtained fame in the mid-1980s when he published Satantango, which he converted for the cinema in 1994.

This b&w film, by Hungarian cinematographer Bela Tarr, is famous for its seven-hour duration.

His additional books consist of:

• The Melancholy of Resistance (1989)
• War & War (1999)
• Seiobo Below (2008)

The award body portrayed Krasznahorkai as "a exceptional grand author in the European tradition that reaches via Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is marked by absurdism and distorted excess."

The author's 2021 book Herscht 07769 has been called as a major contemporary German story, because of its precision in illustrating the country's social upheaval right before the global health crisis.

It is a portrayal of a current village in Thüringen, the Federal Republic of Germany, plagued by societal lawlessness, murder and arson.

"Gentle colossus Herscht Florian is an ward, adopted by a far-right extremist who has apprenticed him as a graffiti remover.

"The leader, a Johann Sebastian Bach enthusiast, is furious that a person is spraying wolf insignias across the statues to the famed musician in their east German town."

A review remarked it as "thus grim from beginning to end."

The writer's latest satirical work, "Zsömle Odavan", reverts to the Hungarian setting.

The lead is elderly Uncle Józsi Kada, who has a hidden entitlement to the monarchy but has gone to great lengths to disappear from the planet.

Earlier Awards

Krasznahorkai before secured the international Booker Prize honor.