The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded Thursday to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, for his “innovative” work which gave a “voice to the inexpressible”, according to the jury.
The Swedish Academy recognized the 64-year-old writer “for his innovative plays and prose that gave voice to the unspeakable.”
Born September 29, 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, Jon Fosse is a jack-of-all-trades writer who is not easily accessible to the general public. However, he is one of the living authors whose plays are the most performed in the world.
When Jon Fosse heard the news, “he was driving through the countryside, towards the fjord north of Bergen in Norway,” said Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm.
“I was surprised when they called, but at the same time not too much,” the 64-year-old writer told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
“I have been cautiously preparing for the fact that this could happen over the last ten years. But believe me, I didn’t expect to get the prize today even if there was a chance,” he said over the phone.
Fosse emerged as a playwright on the European stage thanks to his play written in 1996 Someone will come, popularized when it was staged by Claude Régy in 1999 in Paris. His novel The Boathouse (1989), won him critical esteem.
“Immense work”
He grew up in a pietist-inspired environment with a Quaker grandfather, both a pacifist and a leftist. A pietism from which the young Fosse distanced himself, preferring to call himself an atheist and play guitar in a group, Rocking Chair, before finally embracing the Catholic faith late in life, in 2013.
After literary studies, he made his debut in 1983 with Red Black, a novel where a young man settles scores with pietism. The style, marked by numerous projections over time and alternating points of view, will become his trademark.
“His immense work, written in Nynorsk (one of the written forms of the Norwegian language, editor’s note) and covering a wide variety of genres, consists of a multitude of plays, novels, collections of poetry, “essays, children’s books and translations”, estimated the jury.
“It is through its ability to evoke […] the loss of orientation, and the way in which this can paradoxically give access to a deeper experience, close to divinity, that Fosse is considered an innovator,” detailed Anders Olsson, president of the Nobel committee for literature.
Like his illustrious predecessor in Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vessas, Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographical, with modernist artistic techniques, underlines the jury.
His work, which recalls that of the Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett of whom he is a great admirer, shares the pessimistic vision of his predecessors, including Thomas Bernhard and Georg Trakl, according to the biography of Jon Fosse published by the Academy.
His last masterstroke, Septologian (untranslated) — seven chapters divided into three volumes — exploits a man’s encounter with another version of himself to raise existential questions with, as always, parsimonious and unpredictable punctuation.
The last time a Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a Norwegian was in 1928, when the writer Sigrid Undset won it. Jon Fosse is the fourth Norwegian to win the prestigious award.
Last year, the award went to Annie Ernaux, French author of a work recounting the emancipation of a woman of modest origins, who became a feminist icon.