“Jon Fosse presents everyday situations that are instantly recognisable in our own lives. His radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms. It is through laureate Jon Fosse’s ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation, and how this paradoxically can provide access to a deeper experience close to divinity, that he has come to be regarded as a major innovator in contemporary theatre, the Nobel Prize’s official handle posted on X.
Who is Jon Fosse?
Fosse writes in Norwegian Nynorsk, the least common of the two official versions of Norwegian. After winning the Nobel, he said he regarded the award as a recognition of this language and the movement promoting it, and that he ultimately owed the prize to the language itself, reported Reuters.
Born in 1959, Fosse first started writing novels, switching to plays in his 30s. He went on to become one of Norway’s most-performed dramatists, and is in fact counted among the most performed of living European dramatists. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Fosse has written around 40 plays, apart from novels, short stories, children’s books, poetry and essays.
His “A New Name: Septology VI-VII”, about two painters, both named Asle but with different lives and demons and preoccupations, was a finalist for the International Booker Prize last year.
Other notable works by Fosse include I Am the Wind, Melancholy, Boathouse, and The Dead Dogs.
His writing style, characterised by simple, minimal, searing dialogue, is considered similar to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, both of whom have won the Nobel earlier.
Fosse’s play ‘Nokon kjem til å komme’ (1996; ‘Someone Is Going to Come’, 2002) has specially been compared with Becket’s Waiting for Godot.
His themes explore the absurdity, the futility and yet the power of the human condition; everyday confusions and irresolutions; and the difficulty to form actual connections, despite — and sometimes because of — conversation.
Fosse was considered a hot favourite for the Nobel 10 years ago too. After he did not win that year, he told The Guardian in 2014, “Of course [I would like to win]. But the simple truth is that I was very pleased when the news came that it wasn’t me. Normally, they give it to very old writers, and there’s a wisdom to that – you receive it when it won’t affect your writing.”
Why not very popular in the English-speaking world?
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While Fosse has been celebrated in Europe for a long time, he is not that popular in the United Kingdom or in the UK, and that has impacted his visibility in the rest of the English-speaking world, like in India.
It has been said that the UK and the US find his themes difficult to relate to, and his plays difficult to connect with. In 2014, in a review of his ‘I Am the Wind’, about two men stranded on a boat, The New York Times wrote, “…you can understand why his work might not appeal to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility, which has never been celebrated for its embrace of ambiguity. And red lights are sure to flash in the minds of certain theatergoers when they hear that the characters in “I Am the Wind” are identified as the One and the Other.”
In recent years, however, his popularity has increased in these geographies too.
