Norwegian author Jon Fosse has won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. Making the announcement, the officials said that the award has been given to Fosse for “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” The Norwegian author writes novels heavily pared down to a style, which has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’. Combining strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, Fosse is known for his modernist artistic techniques. His work shows great warmth and humour as well as stark images of human experience.
Jon Fosse was born in Norway on September 29, 1959 and currently lives in Bergen. Many of the Fosse writings are inspired from Norway culture and written in Norwegian language, Norwegian Nynorsk. His work has a wide range of audiences as Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children’s books, essays and plays with more than 40 language translations.
The 1999 staging of Jon Fosse’s play “Nokon kjem til komme” (1996; “Someone Is Going to Come,” 2002) marked his breakthrough as a playwright. Fosse’s individuality is completely apparent in its themes of terrible jealousy and dreadful anticipation as reported by The Nobel Prize on X, formerly called Twitter.
“what’s beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it’s like there’s too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it…,” written by Jon Fosse in his recent writing titled ‘Septology’ released in 2021. The Academy has explained his writing as, “presents everyday situations that are instantly recognisable in our own lives. His radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms.”