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'One bad word is enough to be wounded for all eternity': László Krasznahorkai's Nobel lecture

Scroll | December 9, 2025 3:39 AM CST

Dear ladies and gentlemen!

On receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thoughts with you on the subject of hope, but as my stores of hope have definitively come to an end, I will now speak about angels.

I walk around up and down and I’m thinking about angels, even now I’m walking around up and down, do not believe your eyes – it may seem to you that I am standing here and speaking into a microphone, but I’m not, in reality I’m walking around and around, from one corner to the other, and back again from where I started, and so on and so forth, around and around, and yes, I’m thinking about angels; angels, and immediately I can reveal that these are a new kind of angels, these are angels who have no wings, and so, for example, there is no need to muse about how, if the two wings are sticking out from these angels’ backs, indeed, if these two enormous wings spread out so heavily even beyond these angels’ cloaks, then what kind of work is their heavenly tailor even doing, what kind of unknown knowledge drifts into his workshop up there when he...