Author of the Week: LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI — 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in literature

There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity.

• Literature exists in itself.

• Strings to his bow.

• Speaking to our times of uncertainty.

• A vast black river of type.

• The reality of the present.

• First reactions.

• True life was elsewhere.

• A world author.

• “I didn’t want to be a writer.”

• The other side of the social system.

• Sátántangó (dir: Béla Tarr)