This autumn, the power centre of world literature has been redrawn, with its new capital situated in the imaginative landscape of Hungary.

In a span of just over a month, the two most significant awards, Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize, have gone to two Hungarian authors — László Krasznahorkai and David Szalay, who are connected by a nation, yet separated by their aesthetic universe.

If Krasznahorkai is the reclusive Hungarian prophet of “apocalyptic terror”, Szalay is the Hungarian-British chronicler of rootless modernity. Together, it is a long-overdue acknowledgement of a Central European sensibility that has been speaking its unsettling truths all along.

Heir to Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win was a recognition of his “compelling and visionary oeuvre”, a body of work that finds art’s power where the world ends. To read Satantango  (1985) or The........

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