Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: When the Swedish Academy announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature would go to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to many it felt like the culmination of a long, winding sentence finally reaching its full stop.

For readers of this Hungarian novelist, who was hailed by Susan Sontag as “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse” and by W G Sebald as a writer whose universality “rivals Gogol’s Dead Souls”—the award recognised not only a singular prose style but a radical faith in art’s ability to hold chaos together, even if just by a comma.

The slow dance of the apocalypse

Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai worked as an editor before turning to fiction in the early 1980s. His debut, Satantango (1985), introduced a world both pro

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