Norwegian author Jon Fosse wins Nobel Prize in Literature
STOCKHOLM: Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”
“His immense oeuvre written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spanning a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.
“While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognised for his prose,” the award-winning body said.
Jon Fosse was born 1959 in Haugesund on the Norwegian west coast. His immense work is written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spans a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.
Fosse’s European breakthrough as a dramatist came with Claude Régy’s 1999 Paris production of his play ‘Nokon kjem til å komme’ (1996; ‘Someone Is Going to Come’, 2002).
Even in this early piece, with its themes of fearful anticipation and crippling jealousy, Fosse’s singularity is fully evident.
In his radical reduction of language and dramatic action, he expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms.
It is through this ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation, and how this paradoxically can provide access to a deeper experience close to divinity, that he has come to be regarded as a major innovator in contemporary theatre.
BREAKING NEWS
The 2023 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” pic.twitter.com/dhJgGUawMl— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2023
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million).
Over the years, the literature prize has also picked winners well beyond the novelist tradition, including playwrights, historians, philosophers and poets, even breaking new ground with the award to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.
Last year’s Nobel was won by one of the main favourites, author Annie Ernaux, for her largely autobiographical books examining memory and social inequality, making her the first French woman to win the world’s most prestigious literary award.