The Nobel Academy made an announcement on 5th October 2023 about Jon Olav Fosse, a Norwegian author receiving the Nobel Prize this year for his innovative plays and prose Literature which gives the “voice to the unsayable”.
Official handle of the Nobel Prize posted on X where Mr.Fosse presents everyday scenarios that are directly relatable in our day to day lives. His extreme reduction in the usage of language and the use of dramatic action expresses the powerful different emotions of people in the simplest terms. Jon Fosse is being recognized as an outstanding innovator portraying human disorientation in contemporary theater with his skills, which interestingly gives deeper experience to the readers and leads to a deep divine connection.
Jon Fosse, an author who writes in Norwegian Nynorsk, the less common official language of Norway, considered this Nobel Prize as the recognition for this language and the action supporting the same. Jon Fosse was born in 1959. He started his career as a novelist, later changed to plays in his 30s. Over the time, he started gaining recognition as one of the most well-performed playwrights in Norway and he is among those European dramatists who frequently staged. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages, a report stated by Reuters.
Nearly 40 plays were written by Fosse apart from short stories, essays, novels, poetry and children’s books. Jon Fosse’s work “A New Name: Septology VI-VII ” delves into the lives of two painters, both named Asle, who were struggling with their own problems and concerns. This particular novel was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in the last year. Other works that are notable by Fosse include I Am the Wind, The Dead Dogs, Melancholy and Boathouse. His writing style is considered to be minimal and simple, similar to the works by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, who have won the Nobel prize. His play ‘Someone Is Going to Come’ in 2002 and ‘Nokon kjem til å komme’ in 1996 which is compared with the prominent play Becket’s Waiting for Godot.
A decade ago, Jon Fosse was considered to be a hot favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, when he didn’t get the award, he expressed his gratification to The Guardian in 2014, saying, “Of course, But the truth is that I was very much happy when I wasn’t chosen. Casually, they award this to the much older writers, and there is wisdom in that – you would receive it only when it won’t interfere with your writing.”
