The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Norwegian author, Jon Olav Fosse, by the Swedish Academy on October 5, 2023. The prize was awarded to him for his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. Fosse is the second Norwegian Catholic author to win the Nobel Prize in literature after Sigrid Undset in 1928.
Salient Features of His Works
Jon Fosse’s presentation of typical and routine situations could easily be related to one’s own life. His radical reduction of language and dramatic action has always expressed the unconquerable human emotions of anxiety and feebleness in an easy manner. He has been regarded as a major innovator of contemporary theatre with his capability to kindle man’s loss of orientation. His writings, ironically have always provided access to a deeper experience—close to divinity.
Jon Fosse’s writings are in Norwegian Nynorsk, which is a minority language, rather than Bokmal, the more widely used Norwegian language for literature. According to him, the Nobel Prize is a recognition for the uncommon language and the movement promoting it. He has dedicated his Nobel Prize to the unique Norwegian Nynorsk language. Fosse’s huge compilations over a variety of genres include about 40 plays, a great deal of novels along with poetry collections, essays, children’s books, and translations. His writings offer an amalgamation of transcendent language and his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism in his style of writing.
He uses simple, minimal, and exquisite language which is similar to erstwhile Nobel laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Fosse’s play Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) has specially been compared with Becket’s Waiting for Godot.
The Nobel laureate would receive his awards on December 10, 2023. The award consists of a Nobel Medal and Diploma, and a document confirming the prize amount 11 million Swedish Krona, about US$ 1 million. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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