The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. Josse Prose is increasingly recognised for his prose. Irrespective of the genre, human condition is the central theme of Fosse”s body of work. The laureate has much in common with his great precursor in Norwegian Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas.
As per the official statement, “His immense œuvre is written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spans a variety of genres consisting of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations”. Fosse is regarded as a major innovator in contemporary theater as the laureate had the ability to evoke man”s orientation and found out how paradoxically it has provided access to deeper experience close to divinity. His radical reduction of the language and dramatic actions expressed the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms. Fosse combined strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques. His style of writing is known as “Fosse minimalism”.
Last year, the award was won by author Annie Ernaux, for her autobiographical books examining memory and social inequality. She is the first French women to win the world”s most prestigious literacy award. Previous winners of the prize were given for a body of work, rather than a book and it included Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan.
Noble Prize for literature is the fourth award to be granted this week. On Wednesday, Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov won the Noble Prize for Physics “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.” The awards for other categories will be announced in the coming days.