László Krasznahorkai

Krasznahorkai trained in law before turning to literature, and his fiction carries that same appetite for exhaustive, clause-by-clause argument pushed to unreasonable lengths. Extensive travels through Mongolia, China, and Japan reshaped his later work, pulling it away from the muddy Hungarian villages of Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance toward a more explicitly apocalyptic, East-drawn vision.

His decades-long collaboration with filmmaker Béla Tarr produced several films beyond the Satantango adaptation, a partnership built on shared patience for extremely long unbroken takes that mirror his own sentences. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, recognition for a body of work built almost entirely around the sense that catastrophe is not coming but has, in some sense, already arrived.