STOCKHOLM - Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature, the award-giving body said on Oct 9, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Academy said in a statement.

“But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”

The second Hungarian to win the prize awarded by the Swedish Academy, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in south-east Hungary, near the Romanian border.

His breakthrough 1985 novel, Satantango, is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary.

“The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism,” the Academy said.

Krasznahorkai had a close creative partnership with Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Several of his works have been adapted into films by Tarr, including Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.

Their collaboration has garnered critical acclaim. In 1993, Krasznahorkai received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy of Resistance.

The Nobel Prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million kronor (S$1.5 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 literature prize include French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme, who bagged the first award; American novelist and sh...