Why László Krasznahorkai Won the Nobel Prize

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, came to attention via an unusual route – as a screenwriter. There have been previous Nobel winners with notable film credits, for example Harold Pinter, like Krasznahorkai an heir to Samuel Beckett, who was responsible for some of the most prominent British films of the 1960s and 1970s, all of them directed by Joseph Losey. What differentiates Krasznahorkai is that his sideline didn’t simply attract publicity for his literary output. It was inextricably linked. Pinter adapted novels by Hardy, L P Hartley, and Nicholas Mosley, as well as writing unproduced versions of work by a pair of notable non-recipients of the Nobel Prize, Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust. But the most substantial films which Krasznahorkai wrote for his compatriot Béla Tarr were adaptations of his own first two novels, still perhaps his most accomplished and admired: Sátántangó, published in 1985, filmed in 1994, and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), which became Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).