For Jon Fosse, the fourth Norwegian to win the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, writing has been a way of surviving.
Jon Fosse has just been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.
Despite having been in the running for the award for a number of years, Fosse, as with several other 21st century European laureates like Elfriede Jelinek and the controversial Peter Handke, is still largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Fosse’s massive literary oeuvre includes roughly 40 plays – the Nobel committee called him “one of the most recognised and widely performed playwrights of our time” – as well as novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.
This experimental tour de force, which was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2022 for its third volume, focuses on an ageing painter and widower, Asle, living on the southwest coast of Norway. He lives near another painter who shares his name, but is lonely and consumed by alcohol. The doppelgängers grapple with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness.
Ooze on back not to unsay but say again the vasts apart. Say seen again. No worse again. The vasts of void apart. Of all so far the missaid the worse missaid.