|
Krasznahorkai, 61, won the prestigious 60,000-pound ($90,000)
prize for works that include "The Melancholy of Resistance", "Seiobo
There Below" and "Satantango" and was chosen from among ten
contenders.
"Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary
intensity and vocal range," writer and academic Marina Warner,
who chaired the panel, said as she announced the winner at an
award ceremony in London on Tuesday.
He creates scenes that are "terrifying, strange, appallingly
comic, and often shatteringly beautiful", she said, noting that
Krasznahorkai was "superbly served" by his translators, George
Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet.
Krasznahorkai gained recognition in 1985 when he published "Satantango",
which he later adapted for a 1994 film with Hungarian filmmaker
Bela Tarr, an seven-hour-plus epic about the decline of
communism in Eastern Europe shot in black and white.
"I seriously reckon that there is a very advanced sphere of
literature, high literature so to speak, that serves as a force
against decay," Krasznahorkai told Hungarian daily newspaper
Nepszabadsag in a May 13 interview.
The Man Booker International Prize has previously been awarded
to Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in
2009, Philip Roth in 2011, and Lydia Davis in 2013.
Irish novelist Colm Tóibín said in 2010, "For him, the sentence
is an act of pure performance – a tense high-wire act, a piece
of grave and ambitious vaudeville performed with energy both
comic and ironic."
"Prose for him is a complex vehicle moving through a world both
real and surreal with considerable precision and sharpness," he
said, according to Krasznahorkai's website.
In 1993, Krasznahorkai received the German Bestenliste Prize for
the best literary work of the year for "The Melancholy of
Resistance" and is also the recipient of Hungary's highest
literary award - the Kossuth Prize.
(Editing by Louise Ireland)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
