Norwegian writer Jon Fosse (64 years old) has become the recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his plays and creative works that have given a voice to things that were previously unspeakable."
Jon Fosse's works have been translated into more than 40 languages. Throughout his career as a playwright and writer, he has received numerous prestigious awards.
A portrait of Jon Fosse in 2019 (Photo: Hakon Mosvold Larsen/EPA).
Books for beginners
The powerful and often very short stories in the anthology Scenes from a Childhood clearly illustrate Fosse's literary career from 1983 to 2013.
These stories serve as introductions to the central themes in his work: childhood, memory, family, faith... with a powerful force, a sense of duality, and fatalism.
Disjointed, sometimes deliberately simplistic, Scenes from a Childhood chronicles the author's life journey from youth to old age.
Some notable works include: Red kiss mark of a letter ; And then my dog will come back to me.
If you only read one book by Jon Fosse
In Fosse's 2023 novella Aliss at the Fire , Mrs. Signe lies by the fire in her home by a fjord, dreaming of herself 20 years earlier and her husband, Asle, one day sailing on the water in a storm and never returning.
This book is typical of Fosse's writing style—gloomy, using a recurring, dark central image, unfolding in a cyclical structure of ancestral history (Aliss in the book's title is Asle's great-grandmother); actions are duplicated and repeated (Asley's grandfather shares the same name and suffers the same fate of drowning).
A book described as "full of hypnotic and mysterious elements".
Cover of the book "The Boathouse" (Photo: Time's Flow Stemmed).
Books for hurried readers
Published in 1989, The Boathouse is Fosse's closest work to writing in the crime fiction genre.
The 30-year-old narrator seems to have completely failed in life. He lives with his mother, lives in seclusion, and appears incapable of doing basic things for himself. His most significant achievement is in the past: the rock band he formed with his childhood friend Knut—with whom he has lost contact.
One summer, a chance encounter with Knut—now married and relatively successful—would lead to a devastating outcome.
Alongside this, the narrator is also writing a novel that offers insightful observations of his own "unstable" existence: a perfect example of the adage "just write, don't think" that Fosse taught his students in the late 1980s.
Read a play by Fosse
"I can't help but wonder if the cultural gap between Fosse's world and ours is too wide," wrote a critic for The Guardian when Fosse's 1999 play * Dream of Autumn * premiered in English in Dublin in 2006.
Much has changed in Europe and the rest of the world in the last 17 years. The premise of the play is simple: a man and a woman meet in a cemetery and begin an affair – perhaps they knew each other from a past life.
As they left the cemetery, the man's parents arrived for the funeral, and, as Fosse often writes, time passed by in a long, drawn-out dance of the cyclical nature of generations.
This book is worth the reader's patience.
In Melancholy I and II , Fosse takes the reader deep into the "tortured" mind of the 19th-century landscape painter Lars Hertervig, who died in poverty in 1902 at the age of 70.
His life was plagued by hallucinations and delusions, making his paintings appear dreamlike, yet also magnificent.
Hertervig first experienced psychosis while a student at the art school in Düsseldorf, Germany. His novels (originally published individually but now as a collection) explore the meaning of being an artist.
Melancholy I details the haunting anxieties and final breakdowns of young Hertervig on a terrible day.
Melancholy II serves as a powerful conclusion, with different narrative perspectives—including that of a fictional biographer—years after Hertervig's death.
The three volumes of the book series "Septology I-VII" (Photo: The New York Times).
Masterpiece
The seven books in Fosse's Septology I–VII series (now divided into three volumes: The Other Name , I Is Another , and A New Name ) revolve around Asle, an elderly artist living in the remote southwestern region of Norway.
Like Fosse, Asle grapples with time, art, and self. It is an extraordinary work about existential crisis, amnesia, and persistent clones, whether real or imagined. Life has been lived, and life could have been lived, in the person of another shadow.
These books, filled with suspense and tension, are presented seamlessly, without interruption, allowing the reader to feel as if they are living Asle's life.
Septology is also a work of profound religious belief, in which a man, an artist, and above all, a human being, ultimately concludes a journey: "Surely, only when things are at their darkest, truly at their darkest, do you see the light."
Jon Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway in 1959. His first novel, * Raudt, svart* ( Red, Black ), was published in 1983. In 1989, he gained critical acclaim for his novel *Naustet* ( Houseboat ).
He then went on to write his first play in 1992 - Nokon kjem til å kome ( Someone will come ). In 1994, the play Og aldri skal vi skiljast was performed at the National Theatre in Bergen.
Fosse composed his work in Nynorsk (also known as New Norwegian). This is one of the two standard languages within Norwegian, spoken by approximately 27% of the population.
He is the most performed living playwright in Europe, with his works translated into 40 different languages. A hotel in Oslo (Norway) has a suite of rooms named after him.
In addition to writing plays and novels, Jon Fosse is also a translator.
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