László Krasznahorkai Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

This Thursday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. According to the official statement, Krasznahorkai received the award for his visionary works, which demonstrate the power of art even in the midst of apocalyptic terror. This is the first time since 2002 that a Hungarian author has won this prestigious literary award.

The Academy awarded Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art," Mats Malm, the secretary of the academy, said in his laudation.

"László 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. But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone," the academy said in the statement.

Krasznahorkai, 71, will receive 11 million Swedish crowns (EUR one million or HUF 388 mn ) along with the prize, which is traditionally handed over on Dec 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death.

Born in 1954, after completing his primary and secondary education in Szeged, he studied law at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, graduating in 1983 with a degree in Hungarian language and folk culture from the Faculty of Humanities. He began writing during his university years. His first work, entitled Tebenned hittem (I Believed in You), was published in 1977 in the Budapest-based magazine Mozgó Világ (Moving World). That same year, he worked as a documentarian at Gondolat Publishing House, and from 1982 onwards, he worked as a freelance writer. As a guest of the DAAD German higher education exchange program, he spent a year in West Berlin in 1987. This was the first time he left Hungary. He later returned to the German capital, as he was a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin in 2008.

Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the author has been traveling the world and moving around constantly. Outside of Hungary, he has lived in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and the United States, among other places. From 1990, he spent a long time in East Asia, recounting his experiences in Mongolia and China in his works The Prisoner of Urga and Destruction and Sorrow Under the Sky.

The first Nobel Prize in Literature for a Hungarian writer went to Imre Kertész in 2002. All in all, people of Hungarian origin have won 15 Nobel Prizes, the first having been awarded, in 1905, to Fülöp Lénárd in Physics.