• Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.

• Born in 1959 in Haugesund on Norway’s west coast, Fosse is best known for his dramas, though his writing spans poetry, essays, children’s books and translations.

• His first novel ‘Red, Black’ was published in 1983.

• His magnum opus in prose was the ‘Septology’ series of three books divided into seven parts — ‘The Other Name’ - 2019, ‘I is Another’ - 2020, and ‘A New Name’ - 2021.

• Extending to 1,250 pages, the novel 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.

• His plays, which have been staged across Europe and in the United States, include ‘Someone is Going to Come’, ‘The Name’, ‘Dream of Autumn’ and ‘I am the Wind’.

• Fosse has cited the bleak, enigmatic work of Irish writer Samuel Beckett the 1969 Nobel literature laureate as an influence on his minimalist style.

• Fosse is the first ever laureate in the prize’s history to write in Nynorsk, one of the two official standards of the Norwegian language alongside Bokmal. While 85-90 per cent of Norwegians use Bokmal as their written standard, Nynorsk is only used by about 10-15 per cent of the country’s 5.4 million people.

• Fosse’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages, and there have been more than 1,000 different productions of his plays.

• It has been 95 years since the last time a Norwegian author received the Nobel Prize for literature. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson received the prize in 1903, Knut Hamsun was awarded in 1920 and Sigrid Undset in 1928.

• Since 2011 Fosse has lived at the Grotto, an honorary residence on the premises of Oslo’s royal palace that has housed some of Norway’s foremost authors and composers in the last century.

• Last year, French author Annie Ernaux won the prize for what the prize-giving Swedish Academy called the courage and clinical acuity of books rooted in her small-town background.

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