László Krasznahorkai: Author of 'extraordinary intensity'

Winning wordsmith: Though his works have long been championed in literary circles, László Krasznahorkai was little-known in the mainstream English language publishing world until he won the Man Booker International Prize in May.

The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, whose sentences roll out over paragraphs in what his translator George Szirtes has called a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”, won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize recently for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.

Chair of judges Marina Warner, the British academic and writer, compared Krasznahorkai’s work to Kafka – the author’s own personal literary hero – and Beckett.