17/10/2025

LYFE FRIDAY | OCT 17, 2025

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Hungary’s Krasznahorkai wins literature Nobel

T HE Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Laszlo Krasznahorkai considered by many as Hungary’s most important living author, whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia and melancholy. The Swedish Academy honoured him “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. Speaking to the Nobel Foundation, the 71-year-old author said he was “very happy” and “very proud”. “To be in the line, which contains so many really great writers and poets, gives me power to use my language, my original language, the Hungarian language,” he said. The Academy highlighted Krasznahorkai’s first novel, 1985’s Satantango , which brought him to prominence in Hungary and remains his best-known work. It called the novel, which portrays a destitute group of people isolated in the Hungarian countryside, “a literary sensation”. 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”, the Academy said. “But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone,” it added. Artistic gaze Krasznahorkai was among those mentioned as a possible winner in the run-up to the announcement. The Academy noted the author’s signature flowing syntax with long, winding sentences devoid of full stops. “While it is Krasznahorkai’s weighty, rolling syntax that has perhaps become his signature as an author, his style also allows for a

American critic Susan Sontag crowned Krasznahorkai the “master of the apocalypse” after having read his second book, The Melancholy of Resistance , in 1989, the Academy said. Described as a “feverish horror fantasy” by the Academy, the novel is set in a small Hungarian town where a mysterious circus arrives, its main attraction the exhibition of a giant whale carcass. The bitterness His War and War novel (1999) was described by New Yorker magazine critic James Wood as “one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have ever had as a reader”. Asked in the Nobel Foundation interview about his main inspiration, Krasznahorkai replied: “The bitterness,” describing a “very, very dark” time to be alive. “I am very sad, if I think of the status of the world now, and this is my deepest inspiration,” he said. Literature offered hope, he said in a statement through his literary agency RCW. The Nobel “proves that literature exists in itself, beyond various non-literary expectations, and that it is still being read”. “And for those who read it, it offers a certain hope that beauty, nobility and the sublime still exist for their own sake. It may offer hope even to those in whom life itself only barely flickers.” Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian to win the prize, after Imre

Kertesz in 2002. The Academy has long been criticised for the overrepresentation of Western white men among its picks. Just 18 of the 122 laureates since the prize was first awarded in 1901 have been women, including last year’s winner Han Kang of South Korea. The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a US$1.2 million (RM5.07 million) prize sum. Krasznahorkai will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on Dec 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel. – AFP 2024: Han Kang (South Korea) 2023: Jon Fosse (Norway) 2022: Annie Ernaux (France) 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, Britain) 2020: Louise Gluck (US) 2019: Peter Handke (Austria) 2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro (Britain) 2016: Bob Dylan (US) 2015: Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) 2014: Patrick Modiano (France) 2013: Alice Munro (Canada) 2012: Mo Yan (China) 2011: Tomas Transtromer (Sweden) Nobel Prize in Literature winners, last 14 years:

o Writer lauded for visionary oeuvre, reaffirming power of art amid apocalyptic terror

Krasznahorkai’s books on display at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden. – ALL PICS FROM AFP

lightness of touch and a great lyrical beauty,” Academy member Steve Sem-Sandberg said. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban hailed the prize to Krasznahorkai, calling him “the pride of Hungary”. Krasznahorkai grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. He has drawn inspiration from his experiences under communism, and the extensive travels he undertook after first moving abroad in 1987 to West Berlin for a fellowship. His novels, short stories and

“I just attempted to be as still as Helen would be and to make sure that I didn’t scare them and that they trusted me.” Foy, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of a young Queen Elizabeth II in the hit Netflix series The Crown , joked it felt like she became the birds’s “bodyguard”. ‘Blown away’ Foy’s co-star Denise Gough, who plays Macdonald’s best friend, said four different goshawks were used during filming. “They all had quite different temperaments for different points in the film,” she noted. Gough recalled special on-set rules, including that “nobody could wear yellow” to avoid distracting the predatory birds. “Claire had to do a lot more than I had to,” she said of letting the fearsome-looking creatures sit on a gloved hand. “She was amazing by the end – she was just a complete natural, but initially it’s quite a thing.” Macdonald said seeing her memoir and her goshawk Mabel come to life for cinema audiences had left her “blown away”. “She (Foy) is so amazing... not only that emotional impact of what she’s Critically difficult and demanding, his style was described once by Krasznahorkai himself as “reality examined to the point of madness”. “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 him this prize,” Sem-Sandberg said. essays are best known in Germany – where he lived for long periods – and his native Hungary.

UK filmmakers on working with hawks HOW do you share a film set with a notoriously fierce bird of prey?

For starters: stay still, be quiet and do not wear yellow, according to the makers of a British film about an academic who adopts a hawk while grieving her father’s death. H is for Hawk , an adaptation of a bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald, was screened at the British Film Festival in London recently, ahead of a fuller international roll-out. It will start screening in US cinemas in December, in time to qualify for the 2026 Oscars race. It chronicles the Cambridge University historian, played by Claire Foy, taming and befriending the Northern goshawk as she grapples with the death of her bird-loving father, played by Brendan Gleeson, and increasingly withdraws from human contact. The hawk appears on-screen with Foy for large parts of the movie, posing challenges for the cast and crew. “There’s a real etiquette to dealing with these beautiful creatures, and a real respect and a reverence, and all of us had to observe that,” Foy said on the red carpet of the movie’s screening at the London Film Festival recently.

US film producers Dede Gardner (left) and Jeremy Kleiner at the gala screening of H is for Hawk.

Lionsgate’s UK motion picture group executive vice-president Marie-Claire Benson poses on the red carpet upon arrival to attend the gala screening of H is for Hawk at the Royal Festival Hall, during the 2025 BFI London Film Festival recently.

doing on-screen but the way she interacts with the hawks,” Macdonald said. “It’s a big deal to have a hawk on your fist, it’s like holding a leopard or something! And the honesty with which she portrays the whole thing is

just magnificent.” H is for Hawk is not the first British film to include a large bird as a central character. A landmark Ken Loach drama Kes , in 1969, featured a boy’s bond with a kestrel. – AFP