The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
This year’s winner is Norwegian author Jon Fosse. The academy hailed his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”
A master of contemporary theatre
Born in 1959 in the Norwegian coastal town of Haugesund, Jon Fosse is considered one of the most important contemporary European writers.
He has been described as “the Beckett of the 21st century” by the French daily Le Monde and as “one of the most provocative pens in contemporary theatre,” by Canada’s Globe & Mail.
Fosse published his first novel, Red, Black, in 1983. He has since published numerous novels, stories, books of poetry, essay collections and even children’s books.
After his first play, whose English title is And We’ll Never Be Parted, was published in 1994, the prolific author went on to write some 40 theatrical pieces.
His international breakthrough as a playwright came with the 1999 staging of Someone Is Going to Come by late French theatre director Claude Regy. The play centres on a man and a woman who move to a run-down house in the middle of nowhere to be alone, but quickly become paranoid that “someone is going to come,” sparking hidden jealousies within the couple.
According to the Booker Prize website, his plays have since been staged more than a thousand times around the world in 50 languages.
Fellow Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, who used to be his student, details how influential Fosse’s work was for him in My Struggle.
He was made Chevalier of the Ordre national du Merite of France in 2003.
A one-sentence magnum opus
Fosse’s magnum opus is his Septology, published in three volumes from 2019-2021 under the titles The Other Name, I Is Another and A New Name.
Through a single-sentence monologue of an elderly artist talking to himself, the 1,250-page prose work offers a bleak but ecstatic reflection on art and God.
Fosse has told New Yorker magazine that the ageing artist’s reckoning with religion is “not autobiographical at all,” but the Norwegian author had his own religious awakening a decade ago. Until 2012, he described himself as an atheist, but then joined the Catholic Church and underwent at the same period rehab to overcome his long-term alcohol consumption.
The critically acclaimed work was shortlisted for several prizes, including the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize.
He spends his time between his homes in Austria, in Oslo and in the western part of Norway.
Between his own writing projects, Fosse has also translated other authors’ works, including Kafka’s The Trial, which he describes as one of his favourite novels.
The Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($990,000, €948,000). Last year’s winner was French author Annie Ernaux, whom the Swedish Academy praised for “courage and critical acuity.”
This article was originally published on DW.