Contemporary Voices

Hungarian Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 9 · Contemporary Voices

Since the 1970s Hungarian prose has produced writers of unusual formal ambition, several of them known abroad through translation. This chapter looks at four of them, each very different, and at what it takes for Hungarian writing to be read in English. The Nobel Prize of 2025 went to László Krasznahorkai, the second Hungarian laureate after Imre Kertész (Chapter 8). Titles and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check"; the 2025 award was checked against the Nobel Prize site.

Four Writers

Writer (check each)Known for
Péter Esterházy (1950 to 2016)A playful, allusive postmodern writer, from a famous aristocratic family whose history he used in his work. Harmonia Caelestis (Celestial Harmonies, 2000) is a large novel about his father and his family, with a later companion volume that dealt with the discovery that his father had been an informer for the secret police (check).
Péter Nádas (born 1942)An exacting prose stylist. Emlékiratok könyve (A Book of Memories, 1986) and the very long Párhuzamos történetek (Parallel Stories, 2005) are major works (check).
László Krasznahorkai (born 1954)Born in Gyula; known for long, winding sentences and bleak, darkly comic visions. Sátántangó (1985) and Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance, 1989) are best known. He worked closely with the film director Béla Tarr, whose films made from his books are famous (check).
György Dragomán (born 1973)Born in Transylvania, Romania, and writes in Hungarian. A fehér király (The White King, 2005) is a novel of a boy's life under dictatorship, seen through a child's eyes (check).

The 2025 Nobel Prize

What was awarded The Swedish Academy announced on 9 October 2025 that the Nobel Prize in Literature went to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art" (Nobel Prize website; check the wording there). It followed Kertész in 2002 as the second Hungarian laureate. Reactions, debate and new translations are developing, so use current sources for anything beyond the citation.

Writing in Translation

Translators

English readers know Krasznahorkai largely through the work of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, among others (check), and Nádas and Esterházy through their translators. A distinctive style such as very long sentences poses a real challenge for a translator.

Prizes and visibility

Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 for his body of work (check), an earlier sign of wider attention. A prize can lift a writer's whole backlist into translation.

Other media

Film, as with Tarr's adaptations, has carried Hungarian literature to audiences who may never read the books (see Hungarian Film & Television, planned in this series).

A British comparison The Booker International route, in which a prize for a body of work lifts a foreign writer's earlier books into English, is a modern British mechanism for bringing small-language writers to readers. A British reader meeting Krasznahorkai may find his long sentences comparable in ambition to the later work of some English-language modernists, though the comparison is only a way in.
Check the details Dates, titles, translators and the 2015 and 2025 prizes should be verified against publishers' pages and the Nobel Prize website. Contemporary reputations and political debates are still changing, so treat anything recent as provisional.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Choose two of the four writers and describe how their approach to prose differs.

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Exercise 2

Explain why a style built on very long sentences is difficult to translate and what a translator must decide.

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Exercise 3

Compare how Kertész in 2002 and Krasznahorkai in 2025 reached the Nobel Prize, and say what the two cases suggest about Hungarian literature abroad.

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Quick Reference

  • Writers: Esterházy, Nádas, Krasznahorkai, Dragomán (check)
  • Nobel 2025: Krasznahorkai, announced 9 October 2025
  • Reach: translators, prizes and film
  • Caution: recent reputations are still changing