Jon Fosse has just been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.
The worthy winner, aged 64, is a major figure in Norwegian literary and cultural circles and the fourth Norwegian to win the most prestigious award in world literature. He’s also the second Nobel Prize for Literature winner in a row to be published (in English translation) by Fitzcarraldo Editions, following French writer Annie Ernaux’s win last year.
Fosse, who the translator Damion Searles calls one of the “elder statesmen of Norwegian letters”, works across multiple genres and mediums and writes using a language called “Nynorsk”, or New Norwegian. (It’s one of two current written forms of Norwegian – used by just 10% of the Norwegian population.) Some, though not the writer himself, have interpreted this as a quietly political gesture.
