Last year’s prize went to South Korean author Han Kang for her work that the panel said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai on Thursday won the Nobel Prize 2025 for Literature “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
He joined the illustrious list of laureates that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro. According to the Nobel Prize website, author László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula, southeast Hungary. His first novel, Sátántangó, was published in 1985 (Satantango, 2012), which was a literary sensation in Hungary and the author’s breakthrough work.
Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition, which extends from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess. Another captivating work by Krasznahorkai is the shorter story Aprómunka egy palotáért: bejárás mások őrületébe (Spadework for a Palace: Entering the Madness of Others, 2020) published in 2018.
The literature prize has been awarded 117 times by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to a total of 121 winners. Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang for her body of work that the committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the 2025 Nobels in medicine, physics and chemistry. Nobel Prize award ceremonies are held on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes. Each prize carries an award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million), and the winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.
