Norwegian author Jon Fosse awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

Stockholm: The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Norwegian playwright and novelist Jon Fosse, whose work tackles birth, death, faith and the other “elemental stuff” of life in spare Nordic prose.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced the prize in Stockholm late on Thursday.

Norwegian author Jon Fosse has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Credit: AP

“I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened,” Fosse, 64, said in a statement. “I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations.”

The ethos has been expressed in dozens of enigmatic plays, stories and novels, including a seven-book epic.

One of his country’s most-performed dramatists, Fosse said he had “cautiously prepared” himself for a decade to receive the news that he had won.

“I was surprised when they called, yet at the same time not,” he told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. “It was a great joy for me to get the phone call.”

Fosse, who writes in Nynorsk, the less common of the two official versions of Norwegian, said he regarded the award as a recognition of this language and the movement promoting it, and that he ultimately owed the prize to the language itself.

His version of the language, known as “new Norwegian” and used by only about 10 per cent of the country’s population, was developed in the 19th century with rural dialects at its base, making it an alternative to the dominant use of Danish that followed from a 400-year union with Denmark.

Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said that Fosse’s work, rooted in his Norwegian background, “focuses on human insecurity and anxiety. The basic choices you make in life, very elemental stuff”.

In addition to more than two dozen plays, Fosse has also published novels, essays, collections of poetry and a string of children’s books over a period of four decades.

He has cited the bleak, enigmatic work of Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the 1969 Nobel literature laureate, as an influence on his sparse, minimalist style.

Edmund Austigard, executive officer of Fosse’s publisher, Samlaget, said the author described his work as “slow writing and reading literature”.

“It’s not a type of literature that you bring to the beach and read in an hour or two,” he said. “It’s a type of literature ... that invites you into a unique world and invites you to stay there for a while.”

Fosse’s first novel, Red, Black, was published in 1983, and his debut play, Someone is Going to Come, in 1992.

His work A New Name: Septology VI-VII – described by Olsson as Fosse’s magnum opus – was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022. The final volume in a seven-novel exploration of life, death and spirituality contains no sentence breaks.

His other major prose works include Melancholy; Morning and Evening, whose two parts depict a birth and a death; Wakefulness; and Olav’s Dreams.

His plays, which have been staged across Europe and in the United States and Australia, include The Name, Dream of Autumn and I am the Wind.

Fosse has also taught writing – one of his students was best-selling Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard – and consulted on a Norwegian translation of the Bible.

According to his publisher, Fosse’s work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and there have been more than 1000 different productions of his plays.

Though his books have been translated into dozens of languages and his plays produced around the world, Fosse is what some critics might see as a classic, safe Nobel choice: a highbrow European man with little name recognition beyond small literary circles.

The prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It’s also male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates, including last year’s winner, French author Annie Ernaux.

Others point out that the prize has gone in recent years to a strong mix of authors with both critical acclaim and robust sales, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alice Munro. And the most populist choice by the committee – 2016 laureate Bob Dylan – also sparked plenty of controversy and debate about whether his lyrics rose to the level of literature.

Publisher Austigard said Fosse’s slow prose could be “just what we need and just what people are looking for” in a frenetic world.

“It’s birth, it’s love, it’s death. It’s about what it means to be a human being.”

The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.5 million) from a bequest left by their creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma at the award ceremonies in December.

On Monday, Hungarian-American Katalin Kariko and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for producing the first split-second glimpse into the super-fast world of spinning electrons.

On Wednesday, the chemistry prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology.

AP, Reuters

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