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Presentation speech by Professor Anders Olsson
Member of the Swedish Academy
Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature

Your Majesties, Dear Nobel Prize Laureates,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

This year’s award of the literature prize to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai recognises a rare force in contemporary literature. His debut work from 1985, Satantango, created a sensation. In it he portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a dejected group of souls on a largely abandoned collective farm just before the fall of communism. All is marked by misery and inertia, until two shabby figures unexpectedly appear as messengers either of hope or of the last judgement; it is impossible to know which. Their deceitful pretences leave almost everyone entirely duped.

This apocalyptic theme is further heightened in Krasznahorkai’s second major novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, which is set in a small town in a Carpathian valley. Ominous signs abound, most conspicuously when a ghostly circus rolls in, with a giant stuffed whale as its main attraction. The spectacle sets extreme forces in motion, resulting in both violence and vandalism. Masterfully portrayed in nightmarish scenes is the brutal struggle between order and disorder, where no one escapes the effects of terror.

In his subsequent works, Krasznahorkai further develops his existentially penetrating writing, rooted as it is in a Central European tradition of dark absurdism and burlesque humour that extends from Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard. In the contemporary novel Herscht 07769, he presents the young and powerful hero as a holy fool in the Dostoyevskian sense, infinitely compassionate but rather lacking in intellectual gifts. With brio, he confronts the panic that arises upon the outbreak of violence in a small German town in Thuringia. Against the backdrop of Johann Sebastian Bach’s local legacy, terror and beauty are irreconcilably opposed. In a single sentence extending to four hundred pages, the novel manages not only to capture the complexity of reality but to eclipse it, employing language that becomes a form of music.

Krasznahorkai’s signature as a writer is a flowing syntax that encompasses both weightiness and lightness, melancholy and elation, tall tales and poetic intensity. His inner quest led him early on to China and Japan, which broadened the Central European context of his work, lending it a new, contemplative tone. This is particularly true of the magnificent prose collection Seiobo There Below, which is dedicated to the role of art in a world of blindness and impermanence. Here, European disillusionment meets Eastern mysticism, as in the opening paragraph where the protagonist, on his morning walk through Kyoto, catches sight of a majestic, snow-white heron standing entirely motionless in a riverbed at the heart of a bustling metropolis. A hub of stillness is revealed in the midst of chaos.

Equally unexpected, but less contemplative, is the insight reached by a simultaneous interpreter while on a visit to Shanghai, in one of the short stories from the 2013 collection The World Goes On. After a long day, the man, heavily drunk, finds himself lost in a spectacular traffic inferno known as the Nine Dragon Crossing. What follows resembles a modern version of the myth of Theseus, who becomes a prisoner in the labyrinth where the monster is confined. But Krasznahorkai does not simply recount a story, he transforms this sense of disorientation into language that induces a singular exhilaration in the reader, drawing us into its insane centrifuge. We never learn how the man manages to find his way back to his hotel room, only of his sudden realisation, upon hearing the roar of a waterfall on TV, that everything in life is connected. What is it he is actually experiencing?

All hope does not, therefore, appear to be lost in this dark world. It is just that we do not know how or when it will emerge. There is perhaps a hidden, Heraclitian order in the disorder, amidst the wars that tear our poor world apart.

It is László Krasznahorkai’s greatness as a writer to have succeeded in combining an artistic gaze, entirely free of illusion, that sees through the fragility of the orders established by man, with an unwavering faith in the power of literature.

Dear László Krasznahorkai, on behalf of the Swedish Academy it is my privilege to convey to you our warmest congratulations on being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025. May I now please ask you to step forward and receive your prize from His Majesty the King.

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