OSLO – The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 has been awarded to the Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.
His immense oeuvre written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spanning a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognised for his prose.
This year’s literature laureate Jon Fosse writes novels heavily pared down to a style that has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’.
He presents everyday situations that are instantly recognisable in people’s own lives. His radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms.
It is through laureate Jon Fosse’s ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation, and how this paradoxically can provide access to a deeper experience close to divinity, that he has come to be regarded as a major innovator in contemporary theatre.
“Fosse touches on the deepest feelings you have – anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death,” Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, said in an interview about Jon Fosse.
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