Thursday, October 12, 2023

Jon Fosse: 'Innovative' Norwegian author and playwright wins Nobel Literature Prize

...The Swedish Academy said it was for his "innovative plays and prose which gives voice to the unsayable".

As well as the prize, Fosse receives 11 million Swedish kronor (£822,000)...

...Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson said: "What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have - anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death - such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning.

"In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn't matter if it is drama, poetry or prose - it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness."

...Fosse's "magnum opus in prose", he said, was his recent Septology - made up of seven parts collected in three volumes: The Other Name, I Is Another and A New Name.

The monologue, which progresses seemingly endlessly and without a single full stop over a timespan of seven days, depicts an elderly artist speaking to himself as another person.

"The Septology is a major work, being at the same time as his attempt at reconciliation with his own fate, an elegy to his dead wife [and] dealing with his own career as a painter," Olsson said.

For readers seeking something shorter, Fosse's 2000 novella Morning and Evening is "a wonderful little piece".

...Previous winners of the prize - given for a body of work, rather than a single book - have included Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan. READ MORE from BBC

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