László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, in eastern Hungary, the son of a lawyer and a social security administrator; his father’s Jewish ancestry was kept from him until he was about eleven. He specialised in Latin at secondary school and played piano in jazz and beat groups. He began law studies in Szeged and later in Budapest, broke them off, and in the intervals worked at a series of odd jobs before settling into life as a freelance writer.

His debut, Satantango (1985), set in a decaying collective farm awaiting a false saviour, was an immediate success, and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), in which a circus with a giant stuffed whale brings disorder to a provincial town, confirmed his vision. Both became films by Béla Tarr, with whom he collaborated for decades. After a year in West Berlin in 1987–88 and, from 1990, extended journeys in Mongolia, China and Japan, his work widened: War and War follows an archivist carrying a mysterious manuscript to New York, and Seiobo There Below finds moments of sacred beauty in art across cultures. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming returned to the Hungarian provinces. The prose unfolds in long, winding sentences that rarely pause, at once grave and comic.

Through the translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet he gained a devoted English-language readership, winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. The Nobel Prize in 2025 honoured a compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art. He is the second Hungarian laureate, after Imre Kertész.