Nobel Literature laureate László Krasznahorkai leaves Portuguese festival due to poor health

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, author László Krasznahorkai, will not participate in the International Literary Festival currently underway in the Portuguese town of Óbidos, north of Lisbon.

According to the organisers, the author's publisher informed them that Krasznahorkai had to leave the village of Óbidos “due to health issues requiring immediate attention” and “will not be able to attend the events and media engagements he was so looking forward to.”

The author had already skipped his appearance at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this week, and his participation in Óbidos was highly anticipated as it would have been his first public appearance since receiving the Nobel Prize.

Krasznahorkai was scheduled to take part in a discussion about “death” at “Table 15” on Sunday, the last day of the event, alongside writers Lionel Shriver and Rui Cardoso Martins and moderator Isabel Lucas.

László Krasznahorkai, whose surreal and anarchic novels combine a bleak view of the world with biting humour, received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 9 October for a body of work that champions the power of art in a time of “apocalyptic terror,” according to the Nobel Committee judges at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

The Nobel judges stated that the 71-year-old author, whose novels sometimes consist of a single long sentence, is “a great epic writer” and that his literary work “is characterised by absurdity and grotesque excess.”

In his latest book, “Herscht 07769,” a 384-page work published in Hungary in 2021, the author presents a satire on political extremism through a character, Florian Herscht, who becomes involved with a neo-Nazi group.

Krasznahorkai joins his compatriot Imre Kertész, a Hungarian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, and a list of laureates that includes José Saramago, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Upon learning of the prize, which includes a monetary award of $1 million, the Hungarian author said he was “calm and nervous.”

“This is the first day of my life that I have won a Nobel Prize. I don’t know what the future holds for me,” the Hungarian writer added in an interview with a Swedish radio station.