The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature Jon Fosse – time.news

2023-10-05 13:22:17

by ALESSIA RASTELLI

The Norwegian playwright and writer was awarded for his innovative dramaturgy and prose that give voice to the unspeakable. The first reaction: Moved and grateful, an award for literature that wants above all to be literature, without other considerations

The winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature is Norwegian author Jon Fosse, awarded for his innovative dramaturgy and prose that give voice to the unspeakable. His immense work, written in the Norwegian Nynorsk and which ranges across a variety of genres – continues the motivation of the Swedish Academy -, consists of a wealth of plays, novels, collections of poems, essays, children’s books and translations. And more : While today he is one of the most represented playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognized for his prose. And that’s right. The new Nobel Prize winner is among the most significant voices in contemporary drama, so much so that he has earned the nickname Samuel Beckett of the 21st century. But he is also an author of prose, poetry and non-fiction. On 10 October, the second volume of his narrative work Septologia will be released in Italian from La nave di Teseo: over 1,200 pages without ever a full stop, divided into seven parts, defined by himself at the Buchmesse in Frankfurt 2019 as a work in which themes and ways converge of all my production, but in a new light. Solitude, life and death, God, the sense of art and time, are among the questions that are gradually posed in a slow, enveloping, mystical writing.

The winner: I am touched and grateful

The news of the Award reached the author, whose name was among the favourites, while he was driving near Bergen, on the west coast of Norway. For the last ten years – he told the Norwegian public broadcaster Nrk – I have cautiously prepared for the fact that this could happen. But believe me, I didn’t expect to receive the award today, even though I had a chance. Fosse also released a note through the Norwegian publishing house: I am touched and grateful. I consider this as an award to literature that wants above all to be literature, without other considerations.

The reactions

The Nobel Prize for Literature to Jon Fosse! A great recognition for a unique author who is able to surprise and impress people all over the world. All of Norway is congratulated and proud today! Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store wrote on X (formerly Twitter). And Elisabetta Sgarbi, general and editorial director of La nave di Teseo, comments: I’m still very excited, because he had been one of the first authors that we purchased with the publishing house from the literary agency Berla and Griffini, with a blind investment, on the his new books, the wonderful Septology and in his catalogue. If he were an author of ghosts, of doubles, of invisible things, of life and death, of essential things. A total author, a man of theatre, of prose, for children, devoted to the God of literature.

Septology

Fosse had spoken about Septology in Reading in 2021, explaining that to follow the performances of my theatrical texts I went everywhere, from Europe to Tokyo, New York, Havana. I traveled at least half the year. So, at a certain point, I felt the need to stop and I went back to the beginning: I had already cultivated narrative and poetry before my dramaturgical debut in 1992 with Someone will arrive. I didn’t know where the novel would take me, but I let the writing go. And again: I was simply looking for a slow prose, a work that didn’t need the dramatic intensity of the theater. I was aiming for something where everything could take its time and flow in long periods. Calm down my writing, relax into writing. So I stopped going to the theatre, and I also stopped drinking. Then, however, I returned to dramaturgy. On the other hand, each experience nourished the others.

To the biography

He was born on 29 September 1959 in Haugesund, a small village on the west coast of Norway, growing up in Strandebarm, on the spectacular Hardanger Fjord. He graduated from the University of Bergen in comparative literature and has since begun to dedicate himself full time to writing, teaching for a long time at the Hordaland Writing Academy. Today he lives in the honorary residence of Grotten, in Oslo, granted to him by the King of Norway for his literary merits which made him internationally famous. And now he has been awarded the most important prize.

Jon Fosse ? awarded the 2023 #NobelPrize in Literature ? has much in common with his great precursor in Norwegian Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas. Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques. He includes in his? pic.twitter.com/FkoP8j737R

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2023

The Nobel prize

In 2022, the French writer Annie Ernaux received the award, bringing the number of women awarded to 17 out of 118 graduates. Like every year, in the days preceding the announcement, the Nobel prize was unleashed. Among the names circulated were the Ukrainian writer Andrej Kurkov, the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the Russian writer and screenwriter Lyudmila Ulitskaya and the Chinese writer Can Xue, pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua. And then: the American writer Thomas Pynchon, the Hungarian Lszl Krasznahorkai and the Australian Gerald Murnane. Finally, the most frequent candidates for victory are Salman Rushdie, Mircea Cartarescu, Margaret Atwood, Michel Houellebecq, Emmanuel Carrere, Claudio Magris. And Fosse himself.

October 5, 2023 (modified October 5, 2023 | 3:28 pm)

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