A great pessimist who won the Literature Nobel

László Krasznahorkai’s prose is difficult to excerpt. The sentences never end, so even a few quoted words inevitably draw one into the vortex of an all-consuming syntactical storm system. There is no way out once you are drawn in.

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.