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The 64-year-old Norwegian playwright and writer Jon Fosse became the latest laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. He was honored for his innovative prose and poetry, with which he expressed the unspeakable, said Mats Malm, the awarding secretary of the Swedish Academy. He emphasized that the author has established himself on a global scale, despite the fact that he writes in a variant of Norwegian called Nynorsk, which is spoken by only a minority of the population.

“I’m amazed, but also a little scared. I see it as an award for literature, which is primarily about literature itself and nothing else,” Fosse responded. He became the fourth Norwegian in history to win the Nobel Prize in his category after Björnstjerne Björnson, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset.

The recent laureate is not unknown to Czech readers or viewers. His dramas such as Name or Night sings his songs have been performed all over the world, including local stages, where the National Theater in Brno was the first to stage the play Someone Will Come directed by Tomáš Svoboda in 2001. Last year, the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno awarded the author an honorary doctorate, which Fosse accepted personally.

In Norway, he is often compared to Henrik Ibsen, after all, he also became the laureate of the Ibsen Prize. “I, who didn’t want to write for the theater, ended up doing nothing else for almost 20 years. And the plays I wrote were even staged. Yes, productions were gradually created on all continents, in all European countries. And together it was definitely more than a thousand productions,” Fosse said.

He is a sociologist, philosopher and literary scholar by education. Previously, he worked as an editor or teacher of creative writing, he was also a rock guitarist and a freelance journalist. “Since his debut novel, Red, Black, from 1983, he has created an extremely valuable literary work, which has been translated into more than 40 languages ​​and reads over 50 volumes. He has received many awards for his literary achievements,” stated the year before, Petr Francán, dean of the JAMU Theater Faculty.

According to him, Fosse has the gift of not using words to just talk. “He uses them so that the reader can intrinsically exist among them. It is the deepest, most spiritual way one can work with one’s instrument, with one’s art. Not only to affect one’s viewer, reader, visitor, but to allow him to be with the work of art himself co-existed. To humbly bow before the greatness of the universe and because of that to penetrate through it,” said Francán.

Jon Fosse in 2021 with the release of the third volume of the Septology novel trilogy. | Photo: Reuters

In 2015, Fosse received the important Nordic Council Prize for Literature for his novel trilogy Mämení, Sny Olavova and Na skolunku dne. These three books in Czech translation by Ondřej Vimr were published by Pistorius & Olšanská publishing house. Earlier, the Dauphin publishing house published the two-part novel Melancholia about the real Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig from the 19th century. Fosse’s balladic prose Morning and Evening also received a Czech translation.

The author of existentially tuned novels and minimalist dramas, Fosse gave an interview to the magazine Host during his visit to Brno the year before last. Among other things, he said on that occasion that he always spends part of the year in the Austrian town of Hainburg near the Slovak border, because his wife is Slovak.

“Even ten years ago, I traveled very often to the production of my games all over the world. There were years in which I spent maybe 160 days on the road. But I stopped doing that long before the corona came,” said Fosse, who according to his own words, he lives “very unobtrusively and peacefully”.

He wrote his latest, multi-part novel, Septology, by always getting up at four and writing by around five in the morning. “I lasted until nine. I slept a little during the day and went to bed early,” he described a routine that lasted him for several years. He created about 2000 pages in this way. “Then I had to cut it down, a lot more than I’m used to, so the Norwegian edition ended up being about 1,300 pages,” he added.

Fosse has been writing since he was about twelve years old, and published his first novels and poetry collections in the 1980s. In the following decade, he began to focus more on the theater. “Since then I haven’t written almost anything else. Only a few thinner novels, maybe mainly so that I don’t forget what it’s like to write prose,” he said in an interview for Guest, which preceded his novel trilogy Mámení, Sny Olavova and Na sklonku dne. After her, he threw himself into Septology.

According to the magazine, Fosse’s dramas are characterized by rhythmic repetition of lines and structures, as well as overall minimalism, which evokes the poetics of the theater of the absurd.

Jon Fosse pictured in 2022 New York. | Photo: Getty Images / Profimedia.cz

Last year, the Swedish Academy honored the French writer Annie Ernaux, a year earlier the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah succeeded.

The Academy is still reeling from a sexual harassment scandal that delayed the award in 2018, as well as Peter Handke’s controversial award a year later. The Austrian has been criticized for denying Serbian violence during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The Academy later changed the jury and promised that it would pay more attention to equality when choosing the laureates, whether in terms of the representation of women and men, or individual world regions.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded in the same order every year: medicine goes first on Monday, physics a day later, then chemistry. Thursday belongs to literature, Friday to the peace award. The following Monday, the series is always closed with an award for economics.

The prizes are associated with a reward of 11 million Swedish crowns, which translates to about 23 million crowns. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on December 10, i.e. on the anniversary of the death of the founder of the prize and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.

2023-10-05 11:09:47
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