This year’s literature laureate Jon Fosse writes novels heavily pared down to a style that has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’, according to Nobel Prize Twitter…reports Asian Lite News
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 has been awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”, the Royal Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday.
The 64-year-old author and dramatist had according to the Academy produced works spanning a variety of genres including plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.
Fosse receives 11 million Swedish krona, about USD 991,000.
“I am overwhelmed and grateful,” he said in a news release issued by his Norwegian publisher after the accolade according to the New York Times.
“I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations,” the US daily newspaper reported.
This year’s literature laureate Jon Fosse writes novels heavily pared down to a style that has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’, according to Nobel Prize Twitter.
This can be seen in his second novel ‘Stengd gitar’ (1985), when Fosse presents us with a harrowing variation on one of his major themes, the critical moment of irresolution. A young mother leaves her flat to throw rubbish down the chute but locks herself out, with her baby still inside. Needing to go and seek help, she is unable to do so since she cannot abandon her child. While she finds herself, in Kafkaesque terms, ‘before the law’, the difference is clear: Fosse presents everyday situations that are instantly recognisable from our own lives, according to the Nobel Prize Twitter.
While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognised for his prose, the Swedish Academy described the author born in 1959 in Haugesund in Norway’s west coast.
Fosse writes in Norwegian Nynorsk, one of the two official written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmal.
According to his publisher, since his 1983 fiction debut, Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over 40 plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into 50 languages. Fosse, according to the official Twitter feed of The Nobel Prize has much in common with his great precursor in Norwegian Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas.
The author, it said, combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques. He includes in his Wahlverwandschaften such names as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Georg Trakl.
“While Fosse shares the negative outlook of his predecessors, his particular gnostic vision cannot be said to result in a nihilistic contempt of the world. Indeed, there is great warmth and humour in his work, and a naive vulnerability to his stark images of human experience,” it said. (ANI)
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