László Krasznahorkai

Born on January 5, 1954, in Gyula, a small town in eastern Hungary near the Romanian border, Laszlo Krasznahorkai grew up in a middle-class family, his father Gyorgy was a lawyer who concealed the family's Jewish heritage until Laszlo was about eleven. After attending Erkel Ferenc High School, where he specialized in Latin and played piano in jazz ensembles, he briefly studied law at Jozsef Attila University in Szeged before dropping out after three weeks. He drifted through jobs as a stable boy, miner, and cultural educator, partly to avoid a second year of compulsory military service. He eventually earned a humanities degree from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest in 1983. His debut novel, Satantango (1985), an apocalyptic vision of a collapsed Hungarian collective farm rendered in labyrinthine sentences that can run for pages, established him as a major figure in Hungarian literature. The filmmaker Bela Tarr adapted it into a seven-hour film in 1994, beginning a collaboration that produced Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Turin Horse (2011). The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), his second novel, deepened his reputation for hypnotic, doom-laden prose. Extended travels through Mongolia, China, and Japan profoundly shaped later works like Seiobo There Below (2008). Susan Sontag called him "the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville." He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, the first Hungarian writer to receive it, and in 2025 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art."

In the mid-1990s, near the end of Allen Ginsberg's life, Krasznahorkai stayed in the poet's cramped New York apartment while drafting War and War. Night after night in the small kitchen, Ginsberg talked him through Buddhism, American history, and how to build the neutral, hollowed-out city the novel needed. The advice reshaped the book's entire setting.