Norway’s Jon Fosse wins 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

Norway’s Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature!

The literature all-arounder Jon Fosse is a novelist, essayist, poet, and children´s author but is best known as a playwright.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” the award-giving body announced on Thursday.

As reported, the Nobel Prize will be presented to him by King Carl XVI Gustaf during a formal event in Stockholm on December 10, which also marks the death anniversary of scientist Alfred Nobel.

Jon Fosse was born on September 29, 1959, in Strandebarm, Norway. He currently lives in Hainburg an der Donau in Austria.

For almost forty years he has written novels, plays, poems, stories, essays, and children’s books and is widely considered one of the most important writers of our time.

His award-winning work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and his plays have been staged over a thousand times all over the world. Fosse grew up on a small farm in Strandebarm in the Hardanger region of Norway.

He went to high school in Øystese and studied literature at the University of Bergen.

A full-time writer for most of his adult life, he has also worked as a journalist and taught at the Academy of Writing in Hordaland where one of his students was Karl Ove Knausgaard.

He has also been a literary consultant, for instance for a retranslation of the Bible into Norwegian.

In 2011, the Norwegian state awarded him its honorary artist’s residence for life, The Grotto, located in Slottsparken in Oslo, near the Royal Palace. Today, Fosse lives in Oslo, in Hainburg an der Donau, Austria, and in Frekhaug, near Bergen.