Leia o texto abaixo e responda à questão.

Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region.

“Venezuela says it is launching a “massive mobilization” of military personnel, weapons and equipment in response to the build-up of US warships and troops in the Caribbean Sea.

Land, air, naval and reserve forces will carry out exercises through Wednesday, according to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, who described the deployment as a response to the “imperialist threat” posed by the US build-up.

In addition to regular military units, the exercises will involve the Bolivarian Militia – a reserve force made up of civilians that was created by the late President Hugo Chávez and is named after Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary who secured the independence of numerous Latin American countries from Spain.

Padrino López, who attributed the order directly to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, said the objective of the exercise was to “optimize command, control and communications” and ensure the defense of the country.

The move comes amid increasing tension between the two countries as the US build-up continues. On Tuesday, the US Navy announced the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford – America’s largest warship – had arrived in the US Southern Command area of operations, which includes most of Latin America.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Ford to make its way to the Caribbean from Europe late last month.

The strike group accompanying the Ford brings with it nine air squadrons, two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers – the USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan – the integrated air and missile defense command ship USS Winston S. Churchill, and more than 4,000 sailors.

The US has framed its build-up of forces in the region as aimed at combating drug trafficking and the flow of drugs into the United States, and has carried out strikes on numerous alleged drug boats in recent weeks.

However, Caracas believes the US is really trying to force regime change and some Trump administration officials have privately conceded their strategy is aimed at removing Maduro.

Last month, Trump said he had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela and he has previously suggested he was weighing the possibility of strikes inside the country – though administration officials have since said the US is not currently planning such action.

In his statement Tuesday, Padrino López framed the deployment of the Venezuelan forces as part of Maduro’s wider “Independence Plan 200” – a civicmilitary strategy aimed at mobilizing conventional military forces alongside militia and police forces to defend the country.

Venezuela’s conventional military, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, has some 123,000 members. Maduro has also claimed that his volunteer militias now have more than 8 million reservists, though experts have called into question that number as well as the quality of the troops’ training.

With the arrival of the Ford, there are thought to be roughly 15,000 US personnel in the region.

A significant percentage of all deployed US naval assets were already in the region before the arrival of the Ford group, including the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, amounting to more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, three guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, a special operations ship, a guided missile cruiser and P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft.

At the same time, the US has deployed 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico, which has become a hub for the US military as part of the increased focus on the Caribbean. The US has also deployed at least three MQ-9 reaper drones to the island, according to images captured by Reuters in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Alongside the hardware, there are thought to be around 5,000 US troops in Puerto Rico.

US bombers have also flown several training missions near the Venezuelan coast, including a bomber “attack demonstration” in late October.”

(Fonte: Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region

Leia o texto abaixo e responda à questão.

Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region.

“Venezuela says it is launching a “massive mobilization” of military personnel, weapons and equipment in response to the build-up of US warships and troops in the Caribbean Sea.

Land, air, naval and reserve forces will carry out exercises through Wednesday, according to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, who described the deployment as a response to the “imperialist threat” posed by the US build-up.

In addition to regular military units, the exercises will involve the Bolivarian Militia – a reserve force made up of civilians that was created by the late President Hugo Chávez and is named after Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary who secured the independence of numerous Latin American countries from Spain.

Padrino López, who attributed the order directly to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, said the objective of the exercise was to “optimize command, control and communications” and ensure the defense of the country.

The move comes amid increasing tension between the two countries as the US build-up continues. On Tuesday, the US Navy announced the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford – America’s largest warship – had arrived in the US Southern Command area of operations, which includes most of Latin America.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Ford to make its way to the Caribbean from Europe late last month.

The strike group accompanying the Ford brings with it nine air squadrons, two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers – the USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan – the integrated air and missile defense command ship USS Winston S. Churchill, and more than 4,000 sailors.

The US has framed its build-up of forces in the region as aimed at combating drug trafficking and the flow of drugs into the United States, and has carried out strikes on numerous alleged drug boats in recent weeks.

However, Caracas believes the US is really trying to force regime change and some Trump administration officials have privately conceded their strategy is aimed at removing Maduro.

Last month, Trump said he had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela and he has previously suggested he was weighing the possibility of strikes inside the country – though administration officials have since said the US is not currently planning such action.

In his statement Tuesday, Padrino López framed the deployment of the Venezuelan forces as part of Maduro’s wider “Independence Plan 200” – a civicmilitary strategy aimed at mobilizing conventional military forces alongside militia and police forces to defend the country.

Venezuela’s conventional military, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, has some 123,000 members. Maduro has also claimed that his volunteer militias now have more than 8 million reservists, though experts have called into question that number as well as the quality of the troops’ training.

With the arrival of the Ford, there are thought to be roughly 15,000 US personnel in the region.

A significant percentage of all deployed US naval assets were already in the region before the arrival of the Ford group, including the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, amounting to more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, three guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, a special operations ship, a guided missile cruiser and P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft.

At the same time, the US has deployed 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico, which has become a hub for the US military as part of the increased focus on the Caribbean. The US has also deployed at least three MQ-9 reaper drones to the island, according to images captured by Reuters in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Alongside the hardware, there are thought to be around 5,000 US troops in Puerto Rico.

US bombers have also flown several training missions near the Venezuelan coast, including a bomber “attack demonstration” in late October.”

(Fonte: Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region

Leia o texto abaixo e responda à questão.

Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region.

“Venezuela says it is launching a “massive mobilization” of military personnel, weapons and equipment in response to the build-up of US warships and troops in the Caribbean Sea.

Land, air, naval and reserve forces will carry out exercises through Wednesday, according to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, who described the deployment as a response to the “imperialist threat” posed by the US build-up.

In addition to regular military units, the exercises will involve the Bolivarian Militia – a reserve force made up of civilians that was created by the late President Hugo Chávez and is named after Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary who secured the independence of numerous Latin American countries from Spain.

Padrino López, who attributed the order directly to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, said the objective of the exercise was to “optimize command, control and communications” and ensure the defense of the country.

The move comes amid increasing tension between the two countries as the US build-up continues. On Tuesday, the US Navy announced the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford – America’s largest warship – had arrived in the US Southern Command area of operations, which includes most of Latin America.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Ford to make its way to the Caribbean from Europe late last month.

The strike group accompanying the Ford brings with it nine air squadrons, two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers – the USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan – the integrated air and missile defense command ship USS Winston S. Churchill, and more than 4,000 sailors.

The US has framed its build-up of forces in the region as aimed at combating drug trafficking and the flow of drugs into the United States, and has carried out strikes on numerous alleged drug boats in recent weeks.

However, Caracas believes the US is really trying to force regime change and some Trump administration officials have privately conceded their strategy is aimed at removing Maduro.

Last month, Trump said he had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela and he has previously suggested he was weighing the possibility of strikes inside the country – though administration officials have since said the US is not currently planning such action.

In his statement Tuesday, Padrino López framed the deployment of the Venezuelan forces as part of Maduro’s wider “Independence Plan 200” – a civicmilitary strategy aimed at mobilizing conventional military forces alongside militia and police forces to defend the country.

Venezuela’s conventional military, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, has some 123,000 members. Maduro has also claimed that his volunteer militias now have more than 8 million reservists, though experts have called into question that number as well as the quality of the troops’ training.

With the arrival of the Ford, there are thought to be roughly 15,000 US personnel in the region.

A significant percentage of all deployed US naval assets were already in the region before the arrival of the Ford group, including the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, amounting to more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, three guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, a special operations ship, a guided missile cruiser and P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft.

At the same time, the US has deployed 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico, which has become a hub for the US military as part of the increased focus on the Caribbean. The US has also deployed at least three MQ-9 reaper drones to the island, according to images captured by Reuters in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Alongside the hardware, there are thought to be around 5,000 US troops in Puerto Rico.

US bombers have also flown several training missions near the Venezuelan coast, including a bomber “attack demonstration” in late October.”

(Fonte: Venezuela announces ‘massive mobilization’ of military forces as America’s largest warship sails into region

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/

Laszlo Krasznahorkai Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

    Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dystopian themes and relentless prose, with winding sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

   Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel. Hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, Krasznahorkai has long been revered by fellow writers for his idiosyncratic style and bleak narratives that can often be slyly humorous.

   He’s also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.

   Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an absolutely original style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

  Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel. “It is 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 the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

   A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

   Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

   He was a musical prodigy, and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

   After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

   When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

   Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

  “He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai. Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

   Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience. “The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said. In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

   In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories. “What’s amazing is its anti-gravitational element — all this darkness and within it, an escalating, incredibly deadpan hilarity,” she said.

   The Nobel Prize is literature’s major honor, and typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, the playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.

   While Krasznahorkai’s work has often been praised for its political overtones, he has rejected the idea that he’s writing political allegories. “I never want to write some political novels,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

   Krasznahorkai isn’t comfortable being cast as a social or political prognosticator. He has said he’s never felt at ease discussing his work, and doesn’t see himself as “part of literary life.” “Writing, for me, is a totally private act,” he told The Paris Review. “I’m ashamed to speak about my literature — it’s the same as if you were to ask me about my most private secrets.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/