The Swedish Academy loves nothing less than the element of surprise. No official list. No favorites. Every year, therefore, we have to rely on the rumors that spread on online betting sites. This one is no exception. Until the last moment, the bookmakers were able to announce as big favorites the Norwegian Jon Fosse, the Chinese Can Xue and the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. And it must be said that they were right.
At 1 p.m. this Thursday, October 5, the Swedish Academy revealed, from the lounges of the Svenska Akademien, the name of its laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature: Jon Fosse. She recognized the 64-year-old writer, poet and playwright “for his innovative plays and prose that gave voice to the unspeakable.”
“I am stunned and in a way scared. For me, it is first and foremost a reward that goes to literature which, above all else, aims to be literature, without any other consideration,” said Fosse.
As an author, Jon Fosse is little known to the general French public. He is more so for his theatrical work, which has been translated. “He writes very refined novels in a style now known as “Fosse minimalism,” explains the Swedish Academy. “This can be seen in his second novel Stengd gitar, (1985).” And added: “Fosse presents everyday situations that are immediately recognizable in our own lives.”
Jon Fosse is a child of the fjords born 64 years ago on the west coast of Norway. A region beaten by natural elements and of which it has kept the language, “new Norwegian” (nynorsk). He grew up in a pietist-inspired environment with a Quaker grandfather, both a pacifist and a leftist. A pietism from which the young Fosse distanced himself, preferring to call himself an atheist and play guitar in a group, Rocking Chair, before finally embracing the Catholic faith late in life, in 2013.
After literary studies, he made his debut in 1983 with Rouge, Noir, a novel where a young man settles scores with pietism. The style, marked by numerous projections over time and alternating points of view, will become his trademark. Followed, among others, The Boathouse (1989), which won him critical esteem, and Melancholia I and II (1995-96), another major work.
His latest masterstroke, Septologian – seven chapters divided into three volumes – exploits the encounter of a man with another version of himself to raise existential questions with, as always, parsimonious and unpredictable punctuation.
Fosse came to the theater almost out of necessity: without regular income, in the early 1990s he agreed to write the beginning of a play, took a liking to it and decided to go through with it. Ultimately, it is this genre that will ensure his international notoriety. After And Never We Will Be Separated in 1994, A Day in Summer, Dream of Autumn and I Am the Wind followed. Breaking a decade-long hiatus, he surprises himself by reconnecting with the genre in 2021, with the play Sterk Vind (untranslated).
His characters are not very talkative. Their sentences repeat themselves, except for a few minute changes, and remain in suspense. It is the silences which are often heavy with meaning and which make people, even together, remain alone. In his pieces, “the sociological elements are present: unemployment, loneliness, breakdown of families, but the essential is what is between. In the interstices, the gaps between the characters, between the different elements of the text. It happens more through the silences, through what is not said than through what is said,” he said. His personal life is strewn with flaws. Married three times, this father of six children had to give up drinking after health problems.
Although extremely difficult to stage, his pieces found influential outlets abroad. In 2007, the Daily Telegraph placed him 83rd in a ranking of the 100 living geniuses. According to his publisher, and as noted by Reuters, Fosse’s work has been translated into more than forty languages, and he has had more than a thousand stage adaptations of his plays.
Jon Fosse is the 98th man out of the 115 Nobel Prizes for Literature that have been awarded since 1901. Of the last ten prizes, six were European. Before Jon Fosse’s coronation, only three Norwegian authors (Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson, in 1903, Knut Hamsun in 1920 and Sigrid Undset in 1928) had received the award. With this Nobel Prize for Literature, Jon Fosse is the lucky winner of a tidy sum: 11 million Swedish crowns, or around one million euros.