Two Hungarian authors' works among top three on Austrian public broadcaster's books of the year list

Two Hungarian authors made it into the top three on the list of best books of the year compiled by Austrian public television. András Visky's novel Kitelepítés (Deportation) took first place on the ORF list, while László Krasznahorkai's Zsömle odavan (Zsömle is Waiting, yet to be translated) came in third.

The German edition of András Visky's debut novel Kitelepítés (Deportation) was already at the top of the Austrian public broadcaster's bestseller list in December. The novel, published in Hungarian in 2022, was released in October by Suhrkamp Verlag under the title Die Aussiedlung, (translated by Tímea Tankó) and was presented on November 18 at the CHB – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin in Berlin.

Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller praised the book, saying, "I have never read a book like this before. It is sensational."

"Kitelepítés presents a world that Hungarian readers were not likely to be familiar with: the hell of the Romanian internment camps, which many ethnic Hungarian families also had to endure. The story is based on the author’s own childhood, as his father, a Reformed pastor, was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison in 1958, and his wife and seven children – including two-year-old András – were deported for political reasons, first to the camp in Răchitoasa and then to the camp in Lățești. The novel is a recollection of this traumatic childhood, where survival and faith became the natural language of life," our critic wrote about the novel, with which Visky won the Margó Prize for the best Hungarian prose debut in 2023.

Krasznahorkai's novel Zsömle odavan (Zsömle is Waiting) was published in 2024. As we wrote in our review at the time, after Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, this novel once again guides its readers through the harsh reality of Hungary and offers countless parallels with the author's earlier works, but it also deviates from them in quite a few places, creating surprising new paths in Krasznahorkai’s oeuvre.

Incidentally, Krasznahorkai donated his literary estate to the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) in Vienna in 2024. The collection includes a vast number of documents, audio and video materials and photographs. In addition to the screenplays and accompanying documentation for films based on Krasznahorkai's novels, it also contains initial drafts of novels and short stories, as well as texts of previously unpublished works. The collection also includes his extensive correspondence with more than 700 people in 23 countries since the 1980s. The Austrians hold the Hungarian writer in such high esteem that last year they celebrated László Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize with a 30-hour public reading of his works in Vienna.