Norwegian playwright and novelist Jon Fosse has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, it was announced on Thursday. The Swedish academy said the award was in recognition of Fosse’s “innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”. Fosse wins 11 million Swedish krona (approximately €948,000) in addition to a gold medal.
Following some curveballs from the Nobel committee in recent years – including the award of the prize to Bob Dylan in 2016 – Fosse’s award is perhaps the least surprising in some time. He has been regularly tipped for the prize by both commentators and bookmakers: one made him second-favourite after the Chinese writer Can Xue.
Fosse’s writing also meets a traditional expectation for Nobel winners: his fiction is not straightforward plot-driven storytelling but somewhat experimental, tending to centre on his characters’ internal thoughts rather than external action. The Nobel committee acknowledged the “negative outlook” in Fosse’s “stark images of human experience”, but also praised the “great warmth and humour in his work”.
[ The Other Name: Hypnotic repetition – and no full stopsOpens in new window ]
Fosse acknowledges the ambivalence: “I don’t think my plays are very pessimistic,” he told Belinda McKeon in this paper in 2005. “But neither are they very optimistic.” He has also said: “You don’t read my books for the plots. But it’s not because I want to be a difficult writer. I’ve never tried to write in a complicated way. I always try to write as simply and, I hope, as deeply as I possibly can.”
He has been widely translated into English and celebrated in Britain and Ireland: the first two parts of his Septology series, The Other Name and I is Another, were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2021 and 2022, while the third volume, A New Name, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year.
The Septology series is Fosse’s most acclaimed work, a seven-part novel in three volumes about an ageing Norwegian painter named Asle, and his doppelganger of the same name – told in what Fosse calls “slow prose” – written with no full stops. The Irish Times review of the first volume praised its “subdued comedy” and said the novel’s repetitive style gave it “the hypnotic feeling of a mantra”.
Much of Fosse’s fiction is translated into English by Damion Searls, who learned Norwegian so he could translate his work. Searls described Fosse’s writing as “pure, repetitive, musical phrases in a stripped-down vocabulary” and says that “Fosse is the only writer whose work has made me weep with emotion as I translated it”.
In the English language, Fosse is best known for his fiction, but as noted by the Nobel committee, he is also a playwright, and has been described as “the most produced living playwright” with close to a thousand productions of his plays in dozens of languages. The French newspaper Le Monde described him as “the Beckett of the 21st century”, which is an accolade Fosse would probably welcome. His first play, Someone is Going to Come (1996) was written, as the title hints, as a response to Waiting for Godot.
Ann Henning Jocelyn, who lives in Cashel, Connemara, has translated several of his plays, including Winter, And We Shall Never Part and Visits.
While he may be respectfully praised if not a best-seller worldwide, in his native Norway, Fosse is no less than a literary celebrity. He was awarded a residence within the grounds of the royal palace in Oslo, though he eschews the trappings of fame: “Being alone is a necessity for me.” He has influenced scores of younger Norwegian writers. Among these is Karl Ove Knausgaard, who was once a student in a literary workshop led by Fosse. In his book, Some Rain Must Fall, he described how Fosse advised him to “scrub” every line from a poem Knausgaard had submitted, leaving just one word of the original poem intact.
Fosse’s win also seals another remarkable year for his British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, which was launched less than 10 years ago, but counts four of the last nine Nobel literature laureates among its authors. As well as Fosse, the small press publishes Svetlana Alexievich, who won in 2015, Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Annie Ernaux (2022).
[ Nobel Prize for Literature: Courage defines Alexievich’s workOpens in new window ]
This year’s announcement is, however, disappointing for those Irish writers frequently tipped for the prize, including Edna O’Brien, John Banville and Colm Tóibín. Just four Irish writers have won the prize in its 123-year history – WB Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995) – and only one of those in the last 50 years.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is funded by the estate of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel and is awarded annually to the writer who has, in the words of Nobel’s bequest, “bestowed the greatest benefit on mankind” for writing “in an idealistic direction”.
The prize has been awarded almost every year since 1901, and has been criticised for heavily favouring writers from continental Europe, a point the permanent secretary of the academy, Peter Englund, acknowledged in 2009, saying the prize committee had to work on “not becoming too Eurocentric”. That work, however, goes on, as six of the last 10 winners have been European writers.
