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with one more. “My life is a permanent correction,” he said.

Critically difficult and demanding, his style was described once by Krasznahorkai himself as “reality examined to the point of madness”.

The settings of his novels move across central Europe’s remote villages and towns, from Hungary to Germany, before skipping to the Far East, where his travels to China and Japan left deep-seated impressions on Krasznahorkai.

The Academy highlighted Krasznahorkai’s first novel, published in 1985, “Satantango”, which brought him to prominence in Hungary and remains his best-known work. The Academy called it “a literary sensation”.

The second Hungarian to win the prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, Krasznahorkai was born in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border.

“Satantango” is set in a similarly remote rural area.

“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.

Across the region, collective farms had been set up when farming land was confiscated at the start of communist rule, and many had become symbols of mismanagement and poverty by the time it ended in 1989.

“Everyone in the novel is waiting for a miracle to happen, a hope that is from the very outset punctured by the book’s introductory (Franz) Kafka motto: ‘In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it’,” the Academy said.

Krasznahorkai has repeatedly referenced “The Castle” by Kafka as a key influence.

“When I am not reading Kafka, I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka, I miss thinking about him,” he told the White Review in 2013.

FIERCE CRITIC HAILED

Hailing the noble laureate, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote in a short message on X: “Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary’s Nobel Prize laureate in literature, brings pride to our nation. Congratulations!”

A fierce critic of Orban, Krasznahorkai previously said his government was a “psychiatric case” because of its stance on the Ukraine war. Orban opposes military aid to Kyiv and says Hungary should stay out of the war.

“How can a country be neutral when the Russians invade a neighbouring country?” Krasznahorkai said in an interview with the Yale Review in February.

Much of Krasznahorkai’s inspiration comes from experiences in central Europe on the cusp of the fall of communism. In 1987, he moved from communist Hungary to West Berlin, where he said he found “a democratic ambience” he had never experienced before.

“Ever since, I have never forgotten the taste of freedom,” he said in an interview on the Friderikusz Podcast in 2023.

LITERARY SENSATION

“It is Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the Academy to award him this prize,” Academy member Steve Sem-Sandberg said.

American critic Susan Sontag crowned Krasznahorkai the “master of the apocalypse” after having read his second book, “The Melancholy of Resistance” in 1989, the Academy said.

His “War and War” novel (1999) was described by the New Yorker magazine critic James Wood as “one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have ever had as a reader”.

He is the second Hungarian to win the prize, after the late Imre Kertesz won it in 2002.