Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature

Norwegian author Jon Fosse has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature worth £822,000. It is the second year in a row that a Fitzcarraldo author has won the prestigious award and the fourth Nobel Prize-winning author to be published by the indie press.

Fosse was announced as the winner by the Swedish Academy on Thursday (6th October).

The writer, born in 1959, was praised by the academy for how he "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".

The academy added: "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 academy described his "innovative plays and prose" as giving "voice to the unsayable".

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the academy, revealed he broke the news as the writer was driving in the countryside though Fosse promised to drive home carefully.

Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard told The Bookseller: "Everyone at Fitzcarraldo Editions is over the moon that Jon Fosse has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He’s an exceptional novelist, playwright and poet whose work is deeply rooted in the landscape of the Western Fjords in Norway, where he grew up.

"He writes about universal themes – love, death, friendship, grief – in a prose style that is totally idiosyncratic, almost incantatory. Reading him is a very powerful experience, and I’m delighted that his work will now reach so many more readers." 

Adam Z Levy, publisher of Transit Books, told The Bookseller how the California-based press was "thrilled for Jon". He added: "This is an incredible and much deserved recognition of his work. We were admirers of his writing before we saw those first few pages of what would become his Septology, and have been proud to champion his work here in North America since.

"There’s an ineffable, almost religious quality to the experience of reading Fosse’s writing, which can seem simple on the surface but holds an incredible power."

Fosse’s works include 40 plays, novels, essays, children’s books and translations. He is also one of the most recognised and widely performed playwrights.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, described how Fosse’s work is rooted “in the language and nature of his Norwegian background".

This year’s prize is worth SEK11m (£822,000), an increase from SEK10m last year, according to the BBC. It is awarded for a body of work, rather than a book and there is no shortlist.

Last year French writer Annie Ernaux won the award for “the courage and clinical acuity for which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. 

Both Ernaux and Fosse are published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK. Fosse was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 for A New Name: Septology VI-VII translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls. The book follows Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the south-west coast of Norway, and another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. The pair are doppelgängers, both grappling with existential questions. Judges said the work “draws together art, death, and the idea of God with a vast, gentle grace".

Fosse has sold 8,783 copies for £106,775 in total since 2002 with The Other Name: Septology I-II his bestseller, according to Nielsen BookScan.