STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 has been awarded to Jon Fosse, the Norwegian playwright and novelist, for what the Swedish Academy called his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.
Fosse, 64, is the most performed Norwegian playwright since Ibsen — staged in more than fifty countries — yet almost unknown to the wider public outside Scandinavia and Germany. He writes in Nynorsk, the minority written standard of Norwegian, and becomes one of the few laureates to be honoured in a language variant spoken by barely half a million people.
His work is defined by restraint: long silences, repeated phrases, characters named only as The Man and The Woman. His seven-part prose cycle “Septology”, about an ageing painter talking to his doppelgänger, was shortlisted for the International Booker last year and has drawn comparisons to the mystics.
The Academy’s choice continues a recent pattern: after years of criticism for European insularity, and the scandals of 2018, it has chosen a figure of unimpeachable literary seriousness — a deeply religious writer, a convert to Catholicism, whose plays ask what remains when language runs out.
In Norway the news was received as a national event; the king offered congratulations. Fosse himself, who has lived with betting-shop speculation for a decade, said he was humbled and a little overwhelmed. For a writer of silence, it is the loudest prize there is.
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