Has Krasznahorkai written any screenplays? Everything to know about the Hungarian writer as he wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement happened at a ceremony in Stockholm. According to The Guardian, the medal and the diploma for the award will be given to him in December 2025.

As per the official website of the prestigious award:

“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai, ‘for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.’”

Laszlo was born in 1954 in Gyula, and he is a recipient of the National Book Award in 2019. In 2015, he was honored with the Man Booker International prize. Writer and professor Anders Olsson, who also holds a chair in the Nobel committee, said:

“Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess.”

Throughout his career, Krasznahorkai worked on the screenplay of several movies like Damnation, The Last Boat – City Life, The Man from London, The Turin Horse, and Satantango.

In 1987, he left Hungary and stayed in West Berlin for a year while on a fellowship. At the time when he was writing his 1999 novel, War and War, he spent time in various places in Europe and also put up in poet and author Allen Ginsberg’s place in New York.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai on “beauty in language” and the role of art

In an interview with The Guardian in 2015, Laszlo Krasznahorkai shared that he had an unusual suggestion for new readers. He said he won't suggest any book but simply ask them to sit quietly by a stream. He believed that if they did that, they would eventually meet someone who had already read his books.

Speaking about his work, Krasznahorkai said:

“Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell.”

During an interview with The Yale Review in February 2025, when asked about the role of art in the future, Krasznahorkai said that art was a special way for humans to deal with the feeling of being lost in life. He explained that beauty was real but existed just beyond human reach. People couldn’t fully touch or hold it, but they could only look at it and know it was there. He said beauty was something humans created, built from hope and a wish for something greater.

Meanwhile, as per The Guardian, speaking about his 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, British poet Fiona Sampson said that this work showed Krasznahorkai's genius as a writer.

She said that at the time she was working on getting writers from countries that were once under communist rule to get their work published in English, and this story caught her attention. Even though there were many amazing new writings being discovered at that time, this one stood out to her the most.

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