In the fall of 2025, the map of world literature has been redrawn, with its new capital located somewhere in the fictional landscape of Hungary. In the space of just over a month, the two most important crowns a writer can wear, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize, have been placed on the brows of two authors – Laszlo Krasznahorkai and David Szalay – linked by a nation, but separated by an aesthetic world.
Their actions couldn’t be more different. If Krasznahorkai is the reclusive Hungarian prophet of “apocalyptic terror,” Szalái is the Hungarian-British chronicler of rootless modernity. The latter was today at a glittering ceremony in London, where he received the Booker Prize for his sixth novel, “Flesh.” It is a long-overdue acknowledgment of a Central European sensibility that has been speaking its uncomfortable truths all along.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Labyrinth
Laszlo Krasznahorkai He does not write novels so much as he constructs complex baroque mazes of language from which the reader, and perhaps the author himself, may not find a way out.
The Academy described winning the Nobel Prize as recognition of his efforts.Compelling and insightful work“, a collection of works that find the power of art precisely where the world ends. To read Soon after or The sadness of resistance It is an indulgence in prose that is itself a performance of decadence and perseverance; His famous long, winding sentences are like rivers overflowing their banks, carrying everything before them in a torrent of philosophical despair and grotesque beauty.
He is the heir to Kafka and Bernhard, a writer who declared that his mission was to examine “reality to the point of madness.” His world is a world of collapsing systems and eternal returns, best captured in a seven-hour black-and-white adaptation. Soon after Written by Béla Tarr, a collaboration that feels less like a translation from page to screen and more like a shared hypnotic incantation.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, while David Szalay will win it in 2025, 10 years later.
Accuracy by David Szalay
If Krasznahorkai is the visionary, who gazes into the abyss through his study, then David Salai is his complement as the anatomist, who dissects the specimens produced by the abyss.
Szálai, who was born in Canada, raised in London, and now lives in Vienna, holds his Hungarian heritage as a central tension in his work. “Even though my father is Hungarian, I have never felt at home in Hungary,” Szalay said in a video shown during the ceremony. “I suppose I’ve always been a bit of an outsider there and having lived away from the UK and London for many years, I also think I had a similar feeling about London. So I really wanted to write a book that straddled Hungary and London and involved a character who wasn’t quite at home in either place.”
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This state of not belonging, this eternal movement between worlds, became the engine of his Booker Prize-winning novel.
The jury noted that his Booker Prize-winning novel Flesh is written in “exquisite prose,” a world away from the dense textual thicket of Krasznahorkai. It extends “from a Hungarian residential area to the mansions of London’s wealthy elite”, and traces the disintegration of “an emotionally detached man”.
The fragility of the psyche of modern man
This is Szalay’s great subject, the fragility of the modern male psyche, adrift in a globalized world of transaction and disintegration. While Krasznahorkai’s characters are consumed by cosmic forces, Szalai’s characters are regressed by worldly failures of connection and identity. His win for a novel written in English is a testament to the power of the diasporic voice, a voice that translates specific concerns from Hungary’s past into the global currency of contemporary anxiety.
Two poles
So, what does this remarkable convergence mean? It is not that one “Hungarian style” has triumphed. On the contrary, the two writers represent opposite poles of the spectrum. Krasznahorkai’s work is deeply, almost mysteriously, rooted in the soil and history of his homeland, and his prose rhythm feels as archaic and inescapable as a folk tale.
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Salai’s ideas are fluid, transnational, and immediate. However, together they reserve the condition of modern humans. Krasnahorkai offers us the great, terrifying prophecy of total collapse; Szalay offers an intimate case study of an individual who must navigate its ruins.
For the attentive reader, this fall presents a unique opportunity. The journey from the haunting metaphysical plains of Hungary in Krasznahorkai to the elegant and disorienting lanes of Europe in Szalay is like making a complete pilgrimage through the anxieties of our time.
That both mentors have now received the highest honors in their craft is more than just a celebration of individual genius. It is a sign that the center of gravity of literature is shifting, tilting toward voices that have long recognized that the apocalypse is not a single event, but a series of quiet, personal apocalypses, within which we might find the capacity for endurance.
(tags for translation)David Szalay
