Man Booker International Prize won by Hungarian author

Innovative Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai was chosen as the winner of the sixth Man Booker International Prize awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage. Krasznahorkai was chosen from a list of ten eminent contenders from around the world.

The Man
Booker International Prize, worth GBP 60,000, is presented once every two years to
a living author for a body of work published either originally in English or available
in translation in the English language. It has previously been awarded to
Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009, Philip Roth
in 2011, and Lydia Davis in 2013.

Born in 1954, László Krasznahorkai gained
considerable recognition in 1985 when he published Sátántangó (Satan Tango),
which he later adapted for the cinema in collaboration with the filmmaker Béla
Tarr.  In 1993, he received the German
Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy of
Resistance and has since been honored with numerous literary prizes, amongst
them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize.

Krasznahorkai and his translator George
Szirtes were long-listed for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Sátántangó
and Krasznahorkai has won the Best Translated Book Award in the United States
two years in a row, in 2013 for Sátántangó and in 2014 for 'Seiobo járt odalent' (Seiobo There Below).

The judging
panel for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize was chaired by celebrated
writer and academic Marina Warner. The panel also comprised Wen-chin Ouyang,
Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London;
acclaimed author Nadeem Aslam; novelist and critic Elleke Boehmer, who is
currently Professor of World Literature in English at Oxford University; and
Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books Classics.

Krasznahorkai,
the author of 16 books, also won a prestigious prize last year as he was the
2014 recipient of the America Awards – considered by many as the ‘Alternative
Nobel Prize for Literature’ – for a lifetime contribution to international
writing.