Laszlo Krasznahorkai won Man Booker International Prize in ’15

Among his best-known works are ‘’, about events in a small town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow, and ‘’, which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction.

Although Krasznahorkai published “The Melancholy of Resistance” in Hungarian in 1989, it did not appear in English translation until 1998. “Herscht 07769” was published in English last year in the US. The novel features only one period in its 400 pages.

Much of Krasznahorkai’s fiction is written in sentences that span several pages — a habit shared with Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who received the Nobel in 2023. Krasznahorkai told NYT in 2014 that he had tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”


Krasznahorkai, who was born in Communist Hungary in 1954, made his breakthrough with his 1985 debut novel, ‘’, about a life in a poor hamlet. In recent decades, he has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

Marina Warner, the chair of that year’s judging panel, told reporters that Krasznahorkai was “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic and often shatteringly beautiful”.

Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

My life is a permanent correction: Krasznahorkai
Speaking to Swedish Radio, Krasznahorkai said he had only planned to write one book, but after reading his debut novel, “Satantango”, he wanted to improve his writing with another one. “My life is a permanent correction,” he said. The settings of his novels move across central Europe’s remote villages and towns, from Hungary to Germany, before skipping to the Far East, where his travels to China and Japan left deep-seated impressions on Krasznahorkai.

Krasznahorkai has repeatedly referenced “The Castle” by Franz Kafka as a key influence. “When I am not reading Kafka, I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka, I miss thinking about him,” he told the White Review in 2013.