Prestigious award
Norwegian Jon Fosse receives Nobel Prize for Literature
Nobel Prize winner for literature 2023: the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, here in 2019 at the Frankfurt Book Fair
© Jens Kalaene / DPA
Last year the Nobel Prize in Literature went to the French writer Annie Ernaux. This time the Swedish Academy’s focus is on the far north.
He has been one of the favorites for years, and now he is actually receiving the most important literary award in the world: the Norwegian author Jon Fosse will be awarded this year Nobel Prize in Literature awarded. The Swedish Academy announced this on Thursday in Stockholm. The 64-year-old will receive the Nobel Prize for his innovative plays and prose – in doing so he “gives a voice to the unspeakable,” said the Academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm, at the award announcement in Stockholm’s old town.
When he reached Fosse by phone, he was in the car near his summer house on a fjord north of Bergen, said Malm. Malm noted that he had promised to drive carefully and watch the announcement.
“I’m overwhelmed,” Fosse told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. He was “very, very happy”, but was also a little afraid of all the attention that the Nobel Prize would bring.
Nobel Prize
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Dark and silent plays have made the Norwegian famous. There is often something melancholic and mystical about his texts. Fosse has already written a wealth of works and has received many awards. His first drama in German, “The Name”, won him the Ibsen Prize and the Austrian Theater Prize. His most recent work, published in German, is the novel “I am another” (Rowohlt Verlag).
Nobel Peace Prize follows on Friday
The German literary critic Denis Scheck welcomed the decision in favor of Fosse. “I’m happy for him. I think it’s an excellent choice,” he told the German Press Agency. “This is anything but a Scandinavian home game, but real world literature.” Fosse was an author who found new forms of expression for human loneliness and “a kindred spirit of Samuel Beckett,” Scheck said.
Last year, the Swedish Academy chose the French writer Annie Ernaux as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She received the Nobel Prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory,” as the Academy praised her at the time. Ernaux was only the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel Prize winners in literature to date. In recent years, the award has alternated between men and women.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced every year 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 Prizes are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This year, the awards are worth eleven million Swedish crowns (around 950,000 euros) per category. That is one million crowns more than last year.
Note: This article has been updated.