Born in 1954 in Gyda, he came of age in the long dusk of state socialism. His debut novel, Satantango, a sprawling bleak story set in a dying collective farm became a sensation by the way it treated its subject and its philosophical heft.

His vision is not sentimental. It stands witness to guard over human dignity. His name made rounds before every Nobel season By awarding the prize to him, the importance of stolidity in a world of churn is recognised. His hallmark is his uncompromising sentences. It is dense and recursive often stretching over multiple pages.

He had spent decades cultivating his difficult, unyielding form of literary soil. The Nobel prize citation said that he had been awarded the prize for his "singular prose that in the midst of apocalyptical terror reaffirms the power of art."

It is a befitting tribute to the 71 year old author. He has already won .Man Booker prize and Kossuth prize, the highest Hungarian cultural honour. He covers a unique space, marginal and mythic. Fiercely literary and defiantly non-commercial, compromise has never been associated with him.

A tension between ruination and possibility marked his works Old narratives collapsed and the human impulse to resist change is discernible in his works. His works are a reminder that great art is not always easy. It was an endorsement of literature of resistance.

The characters drift through landscapes of entrophy and ruin. They may be provincial towns, collapsing empires and haunted minds . His prose unfurls across long, labyrinthine sentences that pervades through darkness and grace. They make demands on the readers to look harder, stay longer and feel more. But the readers are rewarded. Their prize is a haunting clarity of faint lights. They are the lights of hope.

The architecture of apocalypse comes alive in his works. Yet it is not doom but optimism he seeks to portray. He recognises a world steeped in conflict and climate crises. There is a pervasive superficiality which does not escape his eyes. But never does he endorse accepting these dismal state of affairs. Apparently it is a journey without maps.

He may lead his readers into the heart of darkness but he does not leave them there. They are witness to this lack of light to eventually emerge out of it. Reading his works placed the readers on the knife edge. But they enjoyed it.

Krasznahorkai's readers are exposed to the most elemental human fears. They are also witness to the possibility of some hope emerging at the end of the tunnel of despair. (IPA Service)