Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: When the call came from Stockholm , Laszlo Krasznahorkai was sitting in a friend’s flat in Frankfurt, visiting someone who was ill. He wasn’t waiting by the phone, nor expecting a life-altering announcement. “I cannot believe that I’m a Nobel Prize winner,” he said. “I am absolutely surprised. I didn’t count on it.”

But surprise quickly gave way to a mixture of pride, humility, and wry humour. “This is more than a catastrophe,” he said, invoking Samuel Beckett’s famously dry response to the same honour . “Do you remember his sentence: ‘What a catastrophe.’ That’s why I told you first that this is more than a catastrophe — it’s happiness and proudness.”

For a writer long hailed as one of the most challenging and visionary voices in European literat

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