The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to writer and playwright Jon Fosse, “for his innovative prose and for giving voice to what cannot be said.” Born 64 years ago in Haugesund, Norway, his first The work was Rojo, Negro, from 1983, which was not translated into Spanish. His literary works include novels, short stories, plays and children’s books. One of his most recent works is Morning and Afternoon (Nordic / De Conatus), which is published today: It tells the life story of a character named Johannes from the cradle to the grave. Trilogy (De Conatus) is another of his translated books: The volume brings together three short novels in which Fosse tells a tragic love story in rural Norway. Septology (De Conatus) is a novel in seven parts and several volumes in which the author searches for the details of society that we ignore but that still influence us.
Fosse’s writing rhythm is very peculiar: he usually does not use periods, only commas. “Maybe I’ll put my baggage as a bad musician aside. For me, writing is listening, it is more of a musical act than an intellectual one. In a text the form must be extremely precise, every comma, every change is measured so that when reading you can see the waves, a beat and the change in rhythm as it progresses can feel the action. This unity between form and content is necessary. When writing, the same thing happens as with humans: the soul cannot be separated from the body, a corpse is not a human being,” he told EL PAÍS in 2019.
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His work has been compared to that of Ibsen and Beckett and he is considered a national author in his home country, where he shares the throne with other relevant writers such as Jo Nesbø and Karl Ove Knausgård. He has also made a significant impact abroad: his work has been translated into 40 languages and in 2007 he was ordained a Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite of France. He is a supporter of Lorca.
Last year’s winner was French writer Annie Ernaux; This was recognition of a long career that was not always appreciated due to the author’s penchant for the autobiographical (or autofiction). The Nobel Prize in Literature is often a source of controversy, whether due to the literary genre awarded (e.g. autofiction, reporting in the case of Svetlana Aleksievich, and even song in the case of Bob Dylan), or due to the winner’s background , sometimes distant (from a Eurocentric perspective). Authors like the Chinese Mo Yan or the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah were unknown to most Western readers.
As for gender (not literary, but identity), in the 20th century the prize was, as was the sign of the times, completely unbalanced in favor of men, but in recent years it has been balanced: the list of winners seems fluid to be every era. There are 103 men and 17 women for this award winner. In the last decade, five women and five men have won, completely evenly. There has been a gender switch every year since 2017, when Kazuo Ishiguro won. Jon Fosse was one of the most popular names in the pools, other most likely names were the Chinese Can Xue, the Australian Gerald Murnane, the Canadian Anne Carson or the Russian Liudmila Ulítskaya.
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