The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 went to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, for his “innovative” work that gave “a voice to what cannot be said,” according to an announcement by the Swedish Academy, which is responsible for the prestigious award, Thursday in Stockholm. Who is Fossa, nicknamed the “writer of silence” with an elitist orientation?
Published on: 05/10/2023 – 18:13
4 minutes
“I did not expect to receive the award today.” With these words, Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse expressed on Thursday his overwhelming happiness after being informed of his winNobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy honored the 64-year-old writer “for his innovative plays and prose works that give voice to the unspeakable.”
Jon Fosse, born on September 29, 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, is a writer with diverse interests and an elitist bent. However, he is one of the most frequently performed living writers in Europe.
After announcing the identity of the winner, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Mats Malm said that Jon Vosse received the news “when he was driving across the countryside towards the fjord north of Bergen in Norway.”
“I was surprised when they called me, but it wasn’t a big surprise at the same time,” the writer told Norwegian public radio NRK.
“For the past ten years, I have been carefully preparing myself for the fact that this could happen,” he said by phone. “But believe me, I did not expect to get the award today even if there was a chance.”
As Fosse said in a statement, “I feel extremely happy and grateful. I consider this an award for literature that aims above all to be literature, without any other consideration.”
Fosse emerged as a playwright on the European stage, thanks to his play Someone is Going to Come, which achieved great popularity in the version directed for the theater by Claude Rigi in 1999 in Paris. Many of his works also received admiration from critics.
Left-wing peace activist
Vosse grew up in an environment close to the Lutheran Pietist movement, with a Quaker grandfather, who was both a peace activist and a leftist.
But Fosse distanced himself from this religious orientation, as he described himself as an atheist, and played the guitar in the band “Rocking Chair,” before he finally embraced the Catholic faith in an advanced period of his life, specifically in 2013.
After receiving literary studies, Vosse launched into the literary field in 1983 with “Red, Black,” a novel about a young man who settles his scores with the Pietist movement. Also, the style of this story, which is full of temporal projections with a series of alternating points of view, became its distinguishing feature.
The Swedish Academy said in its definition of Fosse: “His voluminous work, written in Nynorsk (one of the written forms of the Norwegian language) and covering a wide range of genres, consists of a large number of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.”
“Sense of initiative”
The head of the Nobel Prize in Literature Committee, Anders Olsson, explained that Vosse had a sense of “invention” through his “ability to evoke (…) the loss of the compass, and the way this can paradoxically enable access to a deeper experience.”
Like his brilliant predecessor in Nynorsk literature, Tarje Fyssas, Vosse combines in his works strong local, linguistic and geographical ties, with modern artistic techniques, according to the commission.
In his works, which are similar to those of Samuel Beckett, Vosse shares the pessimistic vision of his predecessors, including Thomas Bernhard and Georg Trakl, according to a biography of Jon Vosse published by the Academy.
In his latest work (“Septologien” in the original), a heptagon divided into three volumes, Vosse explores a man’s encounter with another version of himself to raise existential questions.
The last time the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a Norwegian was in 1928, when it was won by writer Sigrid Undset. Jon Vosse is the fourth Norwegian to win this prestigious award.
Last year, the award went to French author Annie Ernault, for a work that tells the liberation of a woman of humble origins who became a feminist icon.
