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Author László Krasznahorkai, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, will not be participating in the current international literary festival in Obidos, a Portuguese town north of Lisbon.
Organizers said the author’s publisher informed them that Krasznahorkai had to leave the village of Obidos “due to health issues that require immediate attention” and that she “will not be able to participate in the events and media appearances that she was looking forward to.”
The author’s participation in Obidos was highly anticipated as it will be his first public appearance since winning the Nobel Prize, having already missed the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this week.
Krasznahorkai, along with authors Lionel Shriver and Rui Cardoso Martins and moderator Isabel Lucas, was scheduled to participate in a discussion on “Death” at Table 15, the last day of the event, on Sunday.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai combines a dark worldview with biting humor in his surreal and anarchic novels. Received Nobel Prize for Literature on October 9th Jury members of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said they recognized a series of works that championed the power of art in a time of “apocalyptic fear.”
The Nobel Prize jurors said the 71-year-old author, whose novels sometimes consist of a single long sentence, was a “great epic writer” and that his literary work was “characterized by absurdity and grotesque excess.”
In his latest work, Herscht 07769 (384 pages), published in Hungary in 2021, the author satirizes political extremism through the character Florian Herscht, who becomes involved with a neo-Nazi group.
Krasznahorkai joins fellow Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, and whose list of winners includes José Saramago, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Hungarian writer said he was “calm and nervous” when he learned he had won the prize, which includes a $1 million cash prize.
“This is the first time in my life that I have won a Nobel Prize. I don’t know what my future holds,” the Hungarian-born writer added in an interview with a Swedish radio station.
Additional sources of information • AP