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When Samuel Beckett was told he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1969, he said: “What a catastrophe!”
Last night in Stockholm, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who echoed Beckett’s reaction, but added, rather more graciously, “this is more than a catastrophe, it’s happiness and proudness”.
I have read a little Krasznahorkai – not as much as our contributor Julian Murphet, but enough to agree with him that this year’s laureate is a deserving winner and confirm the dark originality of Krasznahorkai’s writing, which had the Nobel committee reaching for the words “visionary” and “apocalyptic”.
This week, alongside a charming extract from Daryl Jones’ book (Be)Wilder: Journeys in Nature (one for all the twitchers out there), a timely look at the history of the Gaza Strip, and excellent reviews of new novels by Chris Kraus and Ian
McEwan, we are featuring an essay on Peter Jackson, the Australian boxing champion you’ve never heard of.
At the peak of his career in the 1890s, Jackson was one of the most famous Australians in the world. But, as Ben Etherington writes, Jackson is more than just a forgotten sporting hero. He styled himself as a gentleman and something of a dandy, in a way that reveals the surprising complexity of the racial politics of the time.
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