Krasznahorkai, Lázló, 1954–, Hungarian writer known for his strange, bleak, obsessive, and surreal novels, short stories, and film scripts. Usually marked by grim rural settings, and often featuring sentences that go on for pages, his prose works are frequently claustrophobic in feeling and apocalyptic in character. His first novel, Satantango (1985, tr. 2012), tells of the benighted lives and futile hopes of the few inhabitants of a dying collective farm; the novel's structure and rhythms are based on the drunken dance that takes place in the local inn. The seven-hour film (1994) based on it was written by Krasznahorkai and directed by B´ela Tarr, who has directed other films based on the novelist's work. Other novels that have been translated into English include The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, tr. 1998), a surreal tale of town visited by a circus with an enormous stuffed whale; War and War (1999, tr. 2006), in which a suicidal Hungarian discovers a brilliant manuscript and takes it to New York;, and Seiobo There Below (2008, tr. 2013), which reflects the author's extensive travels in Asia. He received the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
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