Krasznahorkai, László

The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai has been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize since the early 2000s. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 2015. Krasznahorkai was born in a Jewish middle-class family in Gyula, southeast Hungary, which he describes as "a rather strange, sad place, full of lonely, peculiar people". His father was a lawyer and his mother a social security administrator. Krasznahorkai deserted from military service after having been punished for insubordination, and he drifted around for a few years, doing social work among the Roma and playing the piano in a jazz trio that performed in the Hungarian countryside. He has lived from his writing since he left university with a degree in law and Hungarian in 1983.