Nobel Prize in Literature: John Foss is the 2023 laureate

At a press conference on Thursday, Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, praised Foss’s “sensitive language, which explores the limits of words.”

Fosse’s works have been translated into nearly 50 languages, and he is among the world’s most performed living playwrights. But he has only recently achieved significant acclaim in English-speaking countries, thanks mainly to his novels: A New Name: Septology VI-VII was a finalist for the National Book Award last year, and two of his novels were nominated for the National Book Award the National. International Booker Prize.

He has long been nominated for a Nobel Prize. In 2013, even British bookmakers Prize betting has been temporarily suspended After a wave of bets on his victory, although the award did not reach him until another decade later. When it finally happened, the call from the Nobel Prize organizers came as Voss was traveling to Vrykhaug, a village on the west coast of Norway where he has a house.

In a statement sent through his Norwegian publisher, Voss, 64, said he was “really happy and really surprised” to have received the award. “I was among the nominees for 10 years, and I was sure I would never get the award,” he said. “I simply can’t believe it.”

Asked what he aims to convey to readers in his work, Foss said he hopes to convey a feeling of serenity.

“I hope they find some kind of peace in or from my writing,” he said.

In receiving what is widely viewed as the most prestigious honor in literature, Foss (whose name is pronounced yon-foss-eh, according to his translator) joins a list of laureates including Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Anni Ernault.

Critics have compared Foss’s sparse plays to the work of two other Nobel laureates: Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. He was also called “the new Ibsen” after the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Foss was born in 1959 in Haugesund, and grew up in western Norway, on a small farm in Strandbarm. He began writing poems and stories at the age of 12, and said he found writing a form of escape. “I have created my own space in this world, a place where I feel safe.” Tell The Guardian in 2014.

As a young man, he was a communist and anarchist. He studied comparative literature at the University of Bergen. Voss writes in Nynorsk, a minority language, rather than Bokmål, the Norwegian language most commonly used in literature. While some interpreted his use of Nynorsk as a political statement, Voss said it was simply the language he grew up with.

In 1983, he published his first novel, Red, Black, launching a remarkably prolific career. Among his most famous works are the novels “Melancholia,” which delve into the mind of a painter suffering from a mental breakdown. His novel “Morning and Evening,” which begins with the moment of the hero’s birth and ends with the last day of his life. The seven-volume “Septology,” a work of more than 1,000 pages about two elderly artists who may be the same person: one has achieved success, while the other has become an alcoholic.

Jack Testard, founder of Fitzcarraldo Editions, the British publisher of Fosse’s works, said his works touched on themes such as “love, art, death, mourning and friendship” while “the landscape of the western fjords near Bergen where he grew up” was almost a character. In itself.

Although he began as a poet and novelist, Fosse rose to prominence as a playwright. He gained international fame in the late 1990s with the production in Paris of his first play, Someone’s Gonna Come, about a man and woman seeking solitude in a remote seaside house. Foss said he wrote it in four or five days and did not revise it.

For 15 years, he focused on theatre, traveling extensively to see international productions of his plays. But then he decided to return to fiction, stopped traveling, gave up alcohol and converted to Catholicism.

former atheist Who found religion later in life, Voss described writing as a form of mystical communication.

“When I can write well, there is a silent second language,” he said. Interview with Los Angeles Review of Books In 2022. “This silent language says what it is about. “It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it — a silent voice speaking.”

While Foss’s work is sometimes formally experimental—for example, “Septology” unfolds as a single sentence of stream-of-consciousness narrative—it often feels immersive and captivating.

Decades of writing have taught him humility and letting go of expectations, he said in an email interview Thursday.

He said: “When I start writing, I never feel that I will be able to write a new work. “I never plan anything in advance, I just sit down and start writing. At a certain point, I get the feeling that the work has already been written and I have to write it before it disappears.

Adam Zee said. “His work can be deceptively simple,” says Levy, publisher of Transit Books, a small press that began publishing Fosse in the United States in 2020, with the first of his “Septology” series. “He often writes simple, concise prose, but his books surprise you. They take on this really poignant quality. Sentences repeat, meander, start in one place and then come back to that at some point, sort of spiraling outward.”

Damion Searles, one of Foss’s English translators, said that while Foss wrote in a range of media, a feeling of serenity was the unifying thread in his work, which is why his work is often described as hypnotic or spiritually evocative. expertise.

“One of the key words he uses to talk about his novels is peace,” said Searles, who translates from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch. “There’s a real peace about him, even though things happen, people die, people get divorced, he radiates this serenity.”

Along with the prestige and huge increase in book sales, Foss will receive 11 million Swedish krona, or about $991,000.

Before Foss, the last Nobel Prize winners in Literature were the Norwegians Sigrid Undset, a writer of historical fiction who received the prize in 1928, and Knut Hamsun in 1920.

In recent years, the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, has tried to increase the diversity of authors after facing criticism that only 17 Nobel laureates were women, and that the vast majority of them were from Europe or North America. Vos’s selection will likely be interpreted as a step backwards from those efforts.

Before Thursday’s announcement, at a news conference in Stockholm, Foss was among the favorites, though Kan Xue, a Chinese writer of surreal and often experimental short stories, was also nominated, as was Haruki Murakami. Salman Rushdie; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenyan novelist and playwright.

In a statement issued by his Norwegian publisher on Thursday, Vos said he was “exhausted and somewhat frightened.”

When asked nearly a decade ago about his hopes of winning a Nobel Prize, he said that while he “of course” wanted to get it, he was also wary of the burden of expectation that such a prize would bring.

“Normally, they give it to ancient writers, and there is wisdom in that,” he said. Interview With the Guardian. “You’ll receive it when it doesn’t affect your writing.”

Elizabeth A. Harris Contributed to reports.