László Krasznahorkai. Image: @Nina Subin, provided by Frankfurter Buchmesse
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘A Contemplative, Finely Calibrated Tone’
The opening news conference on Tuesday (October 14) at Frankfurter Buchmesse is to feature the newly named 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai, adding luster to the 77th edition of the world’s largest trade show in book publishing.
Torsten Casimir
Following this morning’s message from the Swedish Academy (October 9) about Krasznahorkai’s honor, Torsten Casimir, Buchmesse’s vice-president for communications and content, said, “The fact that we are able to welcome the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the opening just a few days after the announcement underlines the role of Frankfurter Buchmesse as a global sounding board for literature.
“We are delighted that László Krasznahorkai will be lending his voice to our event in Frankfurt.”
Juergen Boos
Krasznahorkai is to speak at the news conference on a program that’s also to include Juergen Boos, president and CEO of Frankfurter Buchmesse; Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, chair of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels; Vanina Colagiovanni of Argentina’s Gog & Magog; and Mehar Anaokar of the United Kingdom’s Profile Books / Serpent’s Tail Classics.
The news conference, an annual fixture on the eve of Buchmesse, is held this year in Frankfurt Studio, and is restricted to media representatives and content creators who hold press accreditation for Frankfurter Buchmesse. Held in German and English, the event is also to be streamed on Frankfurt’s YouTube channel.
Coincidentally, Krasznahorkai tells the Nobel Prize program during his interview that, in fact, he heard the news about being named the Nobel laureate while in the flat of a sick friend he was visiting—in Frankfurt am Main. “And I cannot believe that I am a Nobel Prize winner.”
The Nobel Prize, as is pointed out by Elizabeth Blair and Neda Ulaby at the United States’ National Public Radio (NPR) is worth US1.2 million.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
In today’s coverage of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win, Alex Marshall and Alexandra Alter at The New York Times note that Krasznahorkai, now 71, “has written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen.”
They also write, “Krasznahorkai had featured among bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the literature Nobel after Imre Kertész, a novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.”
The Swedish Academy, in its rationale for the selection of Krasznahorkai, said that he’s being honored “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
Indeed, the Nobel program also asserts, “László Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess. But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”
Krasznahorkai is also the 2015 winner of the Booker International Prize—a different honor from the Booker Prize for Fiction—and he was shortlisted a second time in 2018 for the same award. The Booker Foundation has written about him that he is “known for his difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, with dystopian and melancholic themes.”
The Nobel’s full bibliography of the work of László Krasznahorkai can be found here.
More from Publishing Perspectives on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here; more on international book fairs and publishing-industry trade shows is here; more on world book publishing and politics is here; more on the German book publishing industry and book business is here; and more on international book and publishing awards is here.
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