In his Nobel Prize Lecture, the Hungarian author and 2025 literature prize awardee László Krasznahorkai announced that he would not speak of hope, but of angels. “Angels,” he said, “always carry a message.” In our violent and hopeless times, as the trumpets of war, ecological crisis, systemic inequality, and technological transformation sound over the world, Krasznahorkai’s angels are befuddled transients, visionary obsessives, and holy fools bearing ambiguous messages of cosmic transcendence. 

Krasznahorkai has famously described his prose as “reality examined to the point of madness.” For him, reality manifests itself as frenetic stasis, a ceaseless ostinato maniacally building towards an elusive peak. His intermedial experiments, colorful cast of characters, and expansive settings mirror the serpentine vagrancy of his novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His coiled yet lucid run-on sentences whose words, as James Wood puts it, “pace ceaselessly around reference,” defy orderly syntax to mimic the improvisational rhythm, pace, and melody of speech. This swirling “sentence-ribbon”—much like the undulating scrolls of his angels—waltzes the reader through the apocalyptic grandeur, profound humanism, and ribald humor of his storyworlds.

Born in Soviet-era Hungary in 1954, Krasznahorkai found literary success as one of the forerunners of New Hungarian Fiction following the release of his first two novels, Sátántangó (1985) and Melancholy of Resistance (1989). Shadowed by censorship and travel bans in the 1980s, these early texts are set within provincial Hungarian villages on the event horizon of a violent revelation. After the fall of the Soviet Union, his work opened its borders to Asian philosophies, religions, and artistic traditions. In the new millennium, he has experimented with artistic, musical, and literary pastiche, drawing from a teenage career as a jazz musician. Worldwide, Krasznahorkai is better known for his collaboration with the late Hungarian director Béla Tarr on five of Tarr’s feature films, among them the seven-hour epic Sátántangó (1994) and the operatic Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). 

We invite scholars at all career stages and from a wide range of (inter)disciplinary traditions and methodologies to think with László Krasznahorkai. We are interested in presentations that use Krasznahorkai’s works and/or their cinematic adaptations as springboards for examining issues of contemporary relevance, including but not limited to: 

• Krasznahorkai in the age of sovereigns and populists
• Paranoia as textual structure and affect
• Human and nonhuman entanglements
• (Post-)apocalyptic worlding
• The aesthetics and politics of intermediality
• Entrapment, exhaustion, and ontological uncertainty
• Geopoetics
• Visions of the East
• Narrative immersion
• Literary and music influences
• Tragicomedy, absurdism, farce, the carnivalesque
• Humanism, rebellion, and the politics of despair
• (The poetry of) translation
• Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr