The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Jon Fosse
This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to the Norwegian author Jon Fosse. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. “I’m overwhelmed and a little scared,” Fosse said of his award.
Dhe Norwegian author Jon Fosse will receive this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy announced this on Thursday in Stockholm. He received the award “for his innovative plays and prose that give a voice to the unspeakable,” said the academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm, at the award announcement in Stockholm’s Old Town. “I’m overwhelmed,” Fosse told the newspaper.Svenska Dagbladet“. He was “very, very happy,” but was also a little afraid of the attention that the Nobel Prize would bring.
Fosse’s plays such as the drama “Hot” about a love triangle are among the most performed contemporary plays in Europe. His more than 50 works have already been translated into around 40 languages. The author also works as a translator and has translated works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, among others, into Norwegian. Three other writers from Norway have already received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1903 the award went to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, in 1920 to Knut Hamsun and in 1928 to Sigrid Undset.
Fosse has received many awards. His first drama, “The Name,” won him the Ibsen Prize and the Austrian Theater Prize. His pieces “The Night Sings Its Songs” and “Dream in Autumn” were also successful. In 2002 he received the Scandinavian National Theater Prize for “Death Variations” and in 2003 he received it for his complete dramatic work.
Last year, the Nobel Prize for Literature, worth ten million Swedish crowns (currently around 920,000 euros), went to the French writer Annie Ernaux. This year the prize money is eleven million crowns (around 950,000 euros).
The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced annually as the fourth Nobel Prize. The winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry had already been chosen from Monday to Wednesday. The Nobel Peace Prize follows on Friday, the only one to be announced not in the Swedish capital Stockholm, but in the Norwegian capital Oslo. The final announcement in the economics category will take place on Monday.
The Nobel Prize winner spent his childhood and youth in a small village on a fjord on the west coast of Norway. His compatriots celebrate him as the most successful Norwegian playwright since Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, “Peer Gynt”, “Nora or A Doll’s House”). Today Fosse lives temporarily in the Austrian town of Hainburg an der Donau. He is married to a Slovakian woman for the third time and has five children.
The ceremonial award ceremony traditionally takes place on December 10th in Sweden’s capital Stockholm, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s (1833-1896) death.