10 Oct Congratulations to dear Laslo Krasnahorkai on the Nobel Prize!
Our beloved friend and participant of the eleventh KROKODIL festival in 2019, Hungarian author Laslo Krasnahorkai, is this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature.
Laslo Krasnahorkai is the second Nobel laureate we have had the pleasure of hosting. We remind that the Nobel laureate Herta Müller participated in our program “Four Countries, One Language” when we presented German-speaking literature at the Belgrade Book Fair in 2017.
Laslo Krasnahorkai was among the stars of the second evening of the KROKODIL Festival in 2019, which featured many illustrious literary names such as Georgi Gospodinov, Miljenko Jergović, Svetislav Basara, Lana Bastašić, and many others. The highly awarded Hungarian author was introduced through a conversation with Marko Čudić (whose brilliant translations would simply not allow his literary presence in Serbia to be the same). During the discussion, he spoke about his literature and the current social moment, which he described as “wandering in an airless space where we allow ourselves to be humiliated.” That evening, before the Belgrade audience, he once again emphasized “human stupidity as a key weapon for mass destruction.” He spoke about “the banality of the time we live in,” but also about the, as he highlighted, “emptiness of the modern world of oblivion.” He bid farewell to the Belgrade audience by reading excerpts from his novel “The World Is Deep.”
The Nobel Prize awarded to Laslo Krasnahorkai today was given “for his compelling and insightful work, which, amid apocalyptic terror, affirms the power of art.”
Krasnahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Đula in southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. The rural environment served as the backdrop for the characters of his first novel, Satantango, which became a literary sensation upon its publication in 1985. In 2015, Krasnahorkai received the International Booker Prize for Literature. He is the 122nd recipient of this award, which has been awarded since 1901, and along with Imre Kertész (2002), Krasnahorkai is the second Hungarian writer to be honored with this prize.
Photo: Laslo Krasnahorkai at the KROKODIL Festival 2019. Creds: Alex Dmitrović.
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