The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded this week to Norwegian author Jon Fosse for his "innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable," the Swedish Academy announced. Fosse has written more than 40 plays, novels, short stories, children's books, poetry, and essays. The Academy said that Fosse's "magnum opus in prose" is Septology, which he completed in 2021 and was published in several volumes. A New Name: Septology VI-VII was a finalist last year for the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the International Booker Prize.
Fosse's debut novel Red, Black (1983) is, the Academy said, "as rebellious as it was emotionally raw, broached the theme of suicide and, in many ways, set the tone for his later work." Another key work is Trilogy (2016), "a cruel saga of love and violence with strong Biblical allusions, [which] is set in the barren coastal landscape where almost all of Fosse's fiction takes place." It was published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive Press.
"In common with his great precursor in Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas, Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques," the Academy said. "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 naìˆve vulnerability to his stark images of human experience."
"Extending to 1,250 pages, [Septology] is written in the form of a monologue in which an elderly artist speaks to himself as another person. The work progresses seemingly endlessly and without sentence breaks, but is formally held together by repetitions, recurring themes and a fixed time span of seven days. Each of its parts opens with the same phrase and concludes with the same prayer to God." It was published in the U.S. by Transit Books. They will also publish Fosse's A Shining later this month.
