“I thank the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, for his congratulations. However, I will still be against his political actions and ideas. I will remain a free writer,” Krasznahorkai noted.
Prime Minister Orban earlier congratulated his compatriot, writing on social media platforms that he “made his nation proud.”
The Nobel Prize winner in literature is a critic of Orban's government
The writer criticized the government in Budapest several times, saying, among others: in this year's interview with the Swedish newspaper “Svenska Dagbladet” that “there is no hope left in today's Hungary” and “democracy is very fragile.”
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Krasznahorkai noted, among other things, that “Orban and his colleagues call our history glorious.” “It's absurd. Hungarian history consists only of failures,” he said.
In an interview given in December last year in New York, Krasznahorkai compared Hungary to a psychiatric hospital from which doctors left. He said that the main problem is that in countries such as Hungary and Germany, millions of people vote for radical right-wing parties.
The writer also commented on the actions of Orban's government regarding the Russian war in Ukraine. “How can a country (Hungary) remain neutral when the Russians are invading a neighboring country?” – he asked in an interview from February this year. for the American literary quarterly “The Yale Review”.
Krasznahorkai became the 122nd winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The previous Hungarian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature was Imre Kertesz, the 2002 winner.
