Norwegian writer Jon Fosse awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for giving “voice to the unsayable”

Jon Fosse, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023. AFP Yonhap News

On October 5 (local time), the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 was awarded to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse.

The Swedish Academy explained the decision by simply stating, “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” The Academy acknowledged Fosse’s immense oeuvre spanning a variety of genres including plays, novels, poetry, essays, children’s books and translations and described him as “one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world,” who was increasingly being recognized for his prose.

Shortly after the announcement, Fosse said in a statement through the Swedish publishing house, Samlaget, “I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations.” The Academy said that the writer was driving in a rural area when they called to inform him of the prize.

Fosse was born on September 2, 1959 in Haugesund on the west coast of Norway. He published his first novel, Red, Black in 1983. In 1988, he received the Nynorsk Literature Prize, an award granted to the best literary work written in Nynorsk every year.

Fosse released the novels Boathouse (1989), The Bottle Collector (1991), Lead and Water (1992), and Morning and Evening (2000). He emerged as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work, Trilogy. It was a work of prose that criticized the pretentiousness and two-faced aspects of human beings through the realities of refugees in Europe in 2014.

Fosse is a well-known playwright. He is internationally renowned for his plays. He received the Scandinavian National Theatre Award for his play, The Girl on the Sofa, released in 2002. His 2003 play, Lilac received the Arts Council Norway Honorary Award. Fosse is a Norwegian playwright with the most works performed on stage after Ibsen.

The Academy explained that Fosse’s plays in their “radical reduction of language and dramatic action, expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms.” Thanks to Fosse’s experimental form that pierces silence and empty space, he is also hailed as “the 21st century Beckett.” In South Korea, there have been several papers analyzing Fosse’s plays. Song Sun-ho (professor at Joongbu University), in the “Study on the Types of Characters in the Drama of Jon Fosse,” described Fosse’s dramas as “a closed text or private text where characters in the most intimate of human relationships, such as family, lovers and friends, appear in a restricted space,” and said that the playwright “expressed the difficulties and incomprehensibility of life with the private text.”

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy, said, “Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background, with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism.” Morning and Evening (Munhak Dongne), translated into Korean, is a short novel that tells the life of an ordinary fisherman named Johannes, from his birth to his journey toward death, in the lonely and bleak fjords in a simple and composed manner. The work is acclaimed as a novel that compresses the repeating narrative of human existence, the beginning and end of life, in an original style. Olsson recommended readers new to Fosse’s works to start with this novella, which he called “a wonderful little piece.” The Korean translation is 152 pages long.

The work is also evaluated as a musical and poetic prose. The Berliner Zeitung said that Fosse’s language in the novella formed a musical structure with the smallest of details thoroughly calculated. The New York Times claimed that Fosse’s works had a “fierce poetic simplicity.”

Boathouse (Saeum) and Trilogy (Saeum) in addition to Morning and Evening were published in South Korea. Later this month, Fosse’s major works published in 1995-1996, Melancholy I, II will be published in a set by Minumsa. The work, which portrays the tragic life of Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, conveys the “fundamental anxiety of humans and the commendable aspiration for the light of life through the vision of a life buried in the abyss, using concise and musical language and an opaque narrative that appears to be going around in circles.”