Norwegian author and dramatist wins Nobel Prize in literature

Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable," the award-giving body said.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” the award-giving body said on Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million).

The academy said that Fosse, born in 1959 in Haugesund on Norway’s west coast, had produced works spanning a variety of genres including plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. He is one of the world’s most performed playwrights, it said.

“Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background, with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism,” Swedish Academy member Anders Olsson said.

Fosse said he was “overwhelmed and somewhat frightened.”

“I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations,” he said in a statement.

Fosse’s European breakthrough as a dramatist came with Claude Régy’s 1999 Paris production of his 1996 play “Nokon kjem til å komme” (“Someone Is Going to Come”).

His magnum opus in prose is the Septology he completed in 2021 – “Det andre namnet” (2019), “The Other Name” (2020), “Eg er ein annan” (2020), “I is Another” (2020), and “Eit nytt namn” (“A New Name” -2021).