Norwegian novelist, poet and playwright Jon Fosse – whose novels explore themes of aging, mortality, love and art and who has found a growing audience in English-speaking countries – won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. Literature “for its innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unspeakable.”
A prolific writer who has published some 40 plays as well as novels, poems, essays, children’s books and translation works, Fosse has long been admired for his direct and transcendent language as well as his formal experiments.
At a news conference on Thursday, Anders Olsson, president of the Nobel Literature Committee, praised Fosse’s “sensitive language that explores the limits of words.”
This Norwegian author’s books have been translated into around 50 languages and he is one of the living playwrights whose works have been most adapted worldwide. But it is only recently that he has achieved widespread recognition in the English-speaking world, largely thanks to his novels: “A New Name: Septology VI-VII” was a finalist for the National Book Award last year, and two of his novels were nominated for the Booker International Prize.
He has long been considered one of the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2013, British bookmakers even temporarily stopped betting on the award after an avalanche of bets came in on his win, despite the award only arriving a decade later. When he was finally named the winner of the prestigious award, Fosse answered the call from Nobel Prize organizers on a trip to Frekhaug, a town on the west coast of Norway, where he has a home.
In a statement sent through his Norwegian publisher, Fosse, 64, said he was “really happy and surprised” to receive the award. “I have been one of the favorites for ten years and was sure I would never win the prize,” he said. “I just can’t believe it.”
When asked what he wanted to convey to readers through his work, Fosse replied that he hoped to give them a sense of serenity.
“I hope you can find some kind of peace in or through my writings,” he said.
In receiving the Nobel Prize, widely considered the most prestigious literary prize, the author joins a list of recipients that includes Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Annie Ernaux.
Critics have compared Fosse’s sober works to the works of two Nobel Prize winners: Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. He was also called “the new Ibsen” after the well-known Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
Fosse was born in Haugesund in 1959 and grew up on a small farm in Strandebarm in western Norway. She began writing poems and stories at the age of 12 and said writing was a form of escape. “I created my own space in the world, a place where I felt safe,” he told The Guardian in 2014.
As a young man he was a communist and anarchist. He studied comparative literature at the University of Bergen. Fosse writes in Nynorsk, a minority language, rather than Bokmål, the Norwegian variant most commonly used in literature. Although some have interpreted his use of Nynorsk as a political statement, Fosse said it was simply the language he grew up with.
In 1983 he published his first novel, Rojo, Negro, beginning a remarkably productive career. His most famous works include the novels “Melancholy,” in which he deals with the thoughts of a painter who suffers a nervous breakdown; his novel “Morning and Afternoon,” which begins with the birth of the protagonist and ends with the last day of his life; and the seven-volume work Septology, a 1,000-plus-page project about two older artists who could be the same person: one was successful, the other became an alcoholic.
Jacques Testard, founder of Fitzcarraldo Editions, Fosse’s British publisher, explained that his work touches on themes such as “love, art, death, grief and friendship”, while “the landscape of the western fjords near Bergen, where he grew up “, a character in itself is almost identical.
Although he began as a poet and novelist, Fosse became famous as a playwright. He gained international recognition in the late 1990s when his first work, Someone is Coming, was adapted in Paris, about the story of a man and a woman seeking solitude in a remote house by the sea. Fosse said he wrote it in four or five days and didn’t revise it.
For 15 years, Fosse focused on the theater and traveled to many places to attend international productions of his plays. Over time, he decided to return to fiction, stopped traveling, gave up alcohol and converted to Catholicism.
Fosse, a former atheist who came into contact with religion late in his life, has described writing as a form of mystical community.
“When I succeed in writing well, a second silent language manifests itself,” he said in a 2022 interview with The Los Angeles Review of Books. “This silent language says what it’s about.” It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it: a silent voice that speaks.
Although Fosse’s work is sometimes formally experimental—Septology, for example, unfolds as a single sentence of a stream-of-consciousness narrative—it can also often feel immersive and compelling.
Decades of writing have taught Fosse to be humble and avoid expectations, he said in an email interview Thursday.
“When I start writing, I never feel like I can write a new work,” he said. “I never plan anything in advance, I just sit down and start writing. And at some point I feel like the work is already written and I just have to write it before it disappears.”
“His work can be deceptively simple,” said Adam Z. Levy, publisher of Transit Books, a small publisher that began publishing Fosse’s works in the United States in 2020, with the first part of his Septology. “He often writes very spare and minimalist prose, but his books surprise you. They take on a truly moving quality. Sentences repeat themselves, they meander, they start in one place and then return to that point at some point, a kind of outward spiral.”
Damion Searls, one of Fosse’s English translators, said that although the author wrote in various media, one of the common aspects of his work was a sense of serenity, which is why his work is often described as hypnotic or evocative of a spiritual experience.
“One of the key words he uses to talk about his fiction is ‘peace,'” said Searls, who translates from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch. “There is a real peace in it, even when things happen, people die, people get divorced, but there is a serenity about it.”
In addition to the prestige and a huge increase in book sales, Fosse receives 11 million Swedish crowns, about $991,000.
Before Fosse, the last Norwegians to win the Nobel Prize for Literature were Sigrid Undset, a historical novelist who won the prize in 1928, and Knut Hamsun in 1920.
In recent years, the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, has sought to increase the diversity of award-winning authors after criticism that only 17 Nobel Prizes went to women and the vast majority came from Europe or South America. Fosse’s election is likely to be interpreted as a setback for these efforts.
Ahead of Thursday’s announcement, Fosse was among the favorites at a press conference in Stockholm, although Can Xue, a Chinese author of often surreal and experimental short stories, was also among the favorites, as was Haruki Murakami; Salman Rushdie and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenyan novelist and playwright.
In a statement released Thursday through his Norwegian publisher, Fosse said he was “overwhelmed and somewhat frightened.”
When asked almost a decade ago about his hopes of winning a Nobel Prize, he said he would “of course” like to receive it, but he was also worried about the expectations that come with it.
“They usually pass it on to much older writers, and that has its wisdom,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “You get it if it doesn’t interfere with your writing.”
Elizabeth A. Harris contributed to this report.
Alex Marshall is a European culture journalist based in London. More from Alex Marshall
Alexandra Alter writes about the publishing industry and the literary world. Before joining The New York Times in 2014, she covered books and culture at The Wall Street Journal. Previously, she was a religion and sometimes hurricane reporter for The Miami Herald. More from Alexandra Alter