László Krasznahorkai in conversation with Colm Tóibín

Our first Literary Friendships event brought together Colm Tóibín with his friend László Krasznahorkai. Described by the Guardian as a ‘visionary writer’, Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango was first published in Hungary in 1985 and is now regarded as a classic. It was finally published in English in 2012, translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes. Krasznahorkai has a three-decade-long collaboration with film director Béla Tarr, who made a seven-and-a-half hour long meditative epic inspired by Satantango depicting a dying collectivist town. Krasznahorkai has said of his work: ‘You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life.’