This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to the Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse. He will be honored for his “innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unspeakable,” as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced. The award is endowed with eleven million Swedish crowns, which is around 950,000 euros.
Jon Fosse mainly writes novels, most recently he published “I is another”, a “heptalogy” that consists of seven books. The first two, collected in one volume, were published in German in autumn 2019 under the title “The Other Name”. Fosse also wrote a number of dramas that are often staged on German stages, most recently at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where his latest play “Starker Wind” was shown in 2021.
Since it was first awarded in 1901, the Swedish Academy has been responsible for selecting Nobel Prize winners for literature. A few years ago she struggled with a scandal surrounding then-Academician Katarina Frostenson and her husband Jean-Claude Arnault, who was convicted of rape. The award ceremony was canceled in 2018 due to the scandal and was rescheduled a year later.
The last German-speaking Nobel Prize winner for literature was the Austrian Peter Handke, who was controversial because of his statements about the Yugoslav wars and was awarded the prize in 2019. Other excellent playwrights included Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and Dario Fo.
In 2020 and 2021, two surprising winners were awarded, the US poet Louise Glück and the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, before the academy agreed on the world writer Annie Ernaux in 2022.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is traditionally announced as the fourth of the Nobel Prizes. 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 Stockholm, Sweden, but in Oslo, Norway. The prizes will be ceremoniously presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.