Nobel Prize in Literature 2023: Norwegian author Jon Fosse wins

Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse (64), “the Beckett of the 21st century” according to Le Monde, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 “for his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.

“I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations,” Fosse, who is also a poet, said in a statement after winning the prize on Thursday.

Fosse, who writes in the least common of the two official versions of Norwegian, said he regarded the award as a recognition of this language and the movement promoting it, and that he ultimately owed the prize to the language itself.

His novel A New Name: Septology VI-VII, translated into English by Damion Searls, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year.

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“His huge oeuvre, spanning a variety of genres, comprises around 40 plays and a wealth of novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations,” Anders Olsson said, chairman of the Nobel committee for literature. “Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism.”

Irish Times reviewer Rónán Hession wrote about the novel: “The Septology series is among the highlights of my reading life. These books are profound in their serenity. I am sure I will return to them again and again at important times in my life. Jon Fosse is a truly great writer and the Septology deserves to be remembered as one of the supreme literary achievements of our time.”

Fosse’s first novel, Red, Black, was published in 1983, but he first made his name in the theatre, the most widely produced modern playwright in Europe. In 2012 Fosse converted to Catholicism and quit drinking before embarking on Septology, a multi-volume novel written in a single sentence, whose narrator is a painter named Asle, also a convert to Catholicism, grieving the death of his wife, Ales.

Fosse told the New Yorker: “I feel that there’s a kind of – I don’t know if it’s a good English word – but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.”

Reviewing Melancholy I-II, also translated by Searls who learned Norwegian so he could translate Fosse, Hession wrote: “while his later novels are not overtly religious, there is a palpable sense that he sees art and spirituality as abiding together in that mysterious part of us that houses our sense of the profound.”

Fosse told Merve Emre in a New Yorker interview last year that he saw organised religion as a challenge to the market forces that dominate our lives. “In the world we are living in, I feel that the powers are economic powers, which are so strong. They run it all. And you have some forces that are on the other side, and the church is one of them. And for the church to exist – and the Catholic Church is the strongest one – you have to force Catholicism in a way. The church is the most important institution, as far as I can see, of anti-capitalist theology. You have literature and art as another institution, but they aren’t as strong as the churches.

In 1965, as a seven-year-old, he slipped on the ice that surrounded his family home and cut his wrist so badly that he was in danger of bleeding to death. As his parents drove him to the doctor, he remembers staring out of the car window and thinking to himself, “Now I am looking at the house for the last time”. Yet he wasn’t frightened, he told Belinda McKeon in an Irish Times interview in 2005 when his play, Winter, translated by Vincent Woods and directed by Rachel West, was staged at the Project Arts Centre. He felt in the experience “a big beauty”, and relished the detachment from himself which it allowed; in fact, he believes, it was from that moment he knew he would become a writer.

[ Jon Fosse interview with Belinda McKeon from 2005 ]

“I don’t think my plays are very pessimistic. But neither are they very optimistic. Sometimes, somewhere, in all the plays, as in Winter, there is a kind of peace. A kind of reconciliation. Yes, that closeness to death ... in a way, it stayed with me.”

He no longer thinks about death so much, he told Emre. “I think the closer you get, the older you get, the less you think about it. I think it was Cicero who said that philosophy is a way of learning to die. And I think literature is also a way of learning to die.”

The Nobel Prize, given for a writer’s entire body of work, is regarded as the most important prize in literature and comes with an award of 11 million Swedish krona (about €948,000). Previous winners include Toni Morrison, JM Coetzee and Bob Dylan.

[ Rónán Hession reviews Melancholy I-II by Jon Fosse: A difficult but deep book about ‘the Norwegian Van Gogh’ ]

The Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, has in recent years tried to increase the diversity of authors considered for the award, after facing criticism that the vast majority of the Nobel laureates have been European or North American, and only 17 of them have been women. Last year’s award went to French writer Annie Ernaux.

Seamus Heaney was the last Irish writer to be honoured, in 1995. Previous winners include Samuel Beckett (1969); WB Yeats (1923) and George Bernard Shaw (1925). – with PA