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László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2015 and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018, László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter

Known for his difficult and demanding novels, often labelled postmodern, with dystopian and melancholic themes, László Krasznahorkai is the author of The Last Wolf, War & War, The Melancholy of Resistance, Seiobo There Below and several other works.

Krasznahorkai has won numerous prizes, including the 2013 Best Translated Book Award and the 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany. He gained considerable recognition in 1985 when he published Satantango, which he later adapted for the cinema in collaboration with the filmmaker Bela Tarr. In 1993, he received the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year for The Melancholy of Resistance. 

Krasznahorkai and his translator George Szirtes were longlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Satantango and Krasznahorkai has won the Best Translated Book Award in the US two years in a row, in 2013 for Satantango and in 2014 for Seiobo There Below. 

He was the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2015, and The World Goes On was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018. 

Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025.

In László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, a sinister circus has put a massive taxidermic specimen, a whole whale, Leviathan itself, on display in a country town. Violence soon erupts, and the book as a whole could be described as a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilisation.

The Man Booker International Prize 2015 judges

Background

Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.

Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.

The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.

The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.

All nominated books

The World Goes On
László Krasznahorkai’s collection of 21 stories, each about ‘speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought’