Hungarian writer wins Nobel Prize in Literature

STOCKHOLM — Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, the award-giving body said on Thursday.

"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 is awarded to the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art," said Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary at the Swedish Academy.

Krasznahorkai, 71, has received many awards, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. The Booker judges praised his "extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way."

He also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming.

Several works, including his debut, Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

He is the first winner from Hungary since Imre Kertesz in 2002.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million crowns ($1.2 million).

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace have been awarded since 1901.

Past winners of the 11-million-Swedish-crown literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who bagged the first award, US novelist and short story writer William Faulkner in 1949, Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill in 1953, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and Norwegian author Jon Fosse in 2023.

Last year's prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang, who became the 18th woman to receive the award, following Swedish author Selma Lagerlof, the first woman to win in 1909, and the first South Korean to receive the award.

The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the prizes in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday.

Over the years, the choices made by the Swedish Academy have drawn as much ire as applause.

In 2016, the award to US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan sparked criticism that his work was not proper literature.

Agencies via Xinhua