Culture
Norwegian Author Jon Fosse Wins The 2023 Nobel Prize In Literature For 'Giving Voice To The Unsayable'
- While he is widely recognised as one of the most performed playwrights globally, his prose has also gained increasing acclaim.
Jon Fosse (Photo: Samlaget)
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 has gone to Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author, "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."
Fosse, born in 1959 in Haugesund on the Norwegian west coast, has an extensive body of work written in Nynorsk.
His work spans various genres, including plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children's books, and translations.
While he is widely recognised as one of the most performed playwrights globally, his prose has also gained increasing acclaim.
The new literature laureate's novels are said to carry a style described as "Fosse minimalism," as seen in his second novel Stengd gitar (1985).
Fosse's early work tackled themes of suicide, fearful anticipation, and crippling jealousy, as per Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, The Swedish Academy, writing in NobelPrize.org.
"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," Olsson writes.
"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," adds the Nobel Committee's chairman.
This "highly dramatic and tightly crafted tale" of the trilogy, as described by Olsson, earned Fosse the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
However, Fosse's magnum opus in prose is considered to be his Septology, completed in 2021, which includes Det andre namnet (The Other Name, 2020), Eg er ein annan (I is Another, 2020), and Eit nytt namn (A New Name, 2021).
This extensive novel spans 1,250 pages and takes the form of a monologue, where an elderly artist speaks to himself as another person.
The work progresses continuously without sentence breaks, but it is held together by repetitions, recurring themes, and a fixed time span of seven days. Each part of the septology begins with the same phrase and ends with a prayer to God.
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