László Krasznahorkai, friend of AUP’s Center for Writers and Translators, Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature

Medin first met Krasznahorkai in Berlin in 2009 when few of the author’s works had been translated into English, and encouraged Krasznahorkai to contribute to the Cahiers Series at AUP. "I was struck by the quality of his writing from my first encounter with The Melancholy of Resistance. It was indisputably literature, on the same plane with the greatest novels I'd ever read…[Krasznahorkai] is master of a distinctly Central European irony.” The author then produced Animalinside, Cahier no. 14, a literary response to a painting of a grotesque creature by German artist and friend Max Neumann, who then produced a series further illustrating this creature. The final work became a dialogue between artist and author.  

Animalinside so pleased Barbara Epler, head of Krasznahorkai’s principal publisher, New Directions, that she commissioned Sylph Editions to print copies for distribution in the US, after which it was reviewed by James Wood in the New Yorker, helping to establish the author’s reputation there.  

Krasznahorkai was not the first—or last—winner of the Nobel Prize in literature to visit AUP. His visit followed that of 2000 laureate, Gao Xingjian, and that of 2003 laureate, J. M. Coetzee, who was also awarded an honorary degree at AUP’s 2010 commencement ceremony. In 2016, AUP welcomed Han Kang, nearly a decade before she became the 2024 laureate and the first Asian woman and Korean author to receive the award. In an article for Le Monde, Florence Noiville recounted how—in Paris—Kang stepped into a room packed with anglophone readers, eager to discuss her work. 

AUP has also welcomed award-winning authors Joshua Cohen, Rachel Cusk, Alan Hollinghurst, Jhumpa Lahiri, Fernanda Melchor, Gudalupe Nettel, Maria Stepanova, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Marina Warner; and francophone authors Jakuta Alikavazovic and Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Notable translators of contemporary world literature, including those of writers Can Xue, Annie Ernaux, Samanta Schweblin, Geetanjali Shree and Olga Tokarczuk, have also given talks on campus.  

As Paris continues to attract writers from around the world, AUP and its CWT serve as an intellectual meeting ground where students and faculty get to work with the leading writers of our times. In conjunction with the CWT, AUP this year launched its first Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, co-led by professors Amanda Dennis and Biswamit Dwibedy. The inaugural cohort of students will spend two years in classes and working on their individual projects, while meeting and working with visiting writers, scholars and artists.  

This year, the Cahiers Series anticipates its 42nd publication, by Jan Steyn ’08 & G’10. With undergraduate and graduate degrees from AUP, including a Masters in Cultural Translation, Steyn currently teaches literature at the University of Iowa, where he directs the MFA in Literary Translation. His text, entitled Jig—Afrikaans for ‘gout’—is part literary history, part memoir, part meditation on translation. Moving between medicine and metaphor, it revisits writers who have lent gout its voice—Hippocrates, Lucian, Petrarch, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens—while following the condition’s afterlives in Afrikaner culture. Photographs by celebrated New Zealand artist Anne Noble, including gnarly mazes of entangled branches, strange bulbous forms, and sharp shards of light, will accompany the text and provide ghostly counterpoints to gout’s crystals and protrusions.