Jon Fosse
Based on Wikipedia: Jon Fosse
The Boy Who Nearly Died and Became a Voice for Silence
When Jon Fosse was seven years old, he nearly died. An accident—the details of which remain private—brought him to the edge of existence, where he saw a shimmering light and felt an overwhelming sense of peace and beauty. Most people who survive such experiences return to ordinary life and eventually forget. Fosse became a writer.
"I think this experience fundamentally changed me," he later reflected, "and perhaps made me a writer."
That childhood brush with death would eventually lead to the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Fosse "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable." It's a fitting description for someone whose artistic project has been, in essence, to capture what exists beyond language—the silences between words, the feelings that precede articulation, the spiritual territory that most writers simply gesture toward before moving on to safer ground.
Writing in a Minority Language
Fosse writes in Nynorsk, and this choice matters more than you might think.
Norway has two official written standards for the Norwegian language: Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål, which translates roughly to "book tongue," evolved from the Danish that dominated Norwegian writing during centuries of Danish rule. Nynorsk, meaning "New Norwegian," was deliberately constructed in the nineteenth century from rural Norwegian dialects as an act of cultural nationalism—a way of giving Norway a written language that actually reflected how ordinary Norwegians spoke, rather than the language of their former colonial administrators.
Today, only about ten to fifteen percent of Norwegians use Nynorsk as their primary written form. It remains associated with western Norway, with rural communities, with a certain cultural traditionalism that can feel at odds with cosmopolitan modernity. When Fosse enrolled at the University of Bergen to study comparative literature, he made the deliberate choice to write in this minority language.
The decision connected him to a specific literary tradition. Tarjei Vesaas, who wrote haunting psychological novels in Nynorsk during the mid-twentieth century, became a crucial influence. When Fosse published his debut novel in 1983, a book called Raudt, svart (Red, Black), critics immediately noticed the Vesaas influence—and something else. While Norwegian literature at the time favored social realism, novels engaged with politics and society, Fosse's book prioritized linguistic expression over plot. It was more interested in how words felt than in what characters did.
This would become his signature. When Fosse won the Nobel Prize, he became the first Nynorsk writer ever to receive it—a remarkable fact given that the prize has existed since 1901. Three other Norwegians had won before him: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in 1903, Knut Hamsun in 1920, and Sigrid Undset in 1928. All wrote in Bokmål.
The Hippie Who Became Europe's Most Performed Playwright
Fosse's path to literary seriousness was not inevitable.
Growing up in Strandebarm, a small village in western Norway, he was raised by Quakers and Pietists—Protestant traditions that emphasize direct spiritual experience and personal moral seriousness. But as a teenager, Fosse rebelled into communism, anarchism, and countercultural politics. He has described himself, without apparent embarrassment, as a "hippie."
He wanted to be a rock guitarist. He played fiddle. Much of his early writing practice involved creating lyrics for music rather than literature. Only when he gave up his musical ambitions did writing take over completely.
The shift proved consequential. Today, Fosse is the most performed Norwegian playwright since Henrik Ibsen—and given that Ibsen essentially invented modern drama in the nineteenth century, this is not a small claim. Fosse's plays have been produced on over a thousand stages worldwide, making him one of the most performed living playwrights on earth.
His dramatic work represents something like a modern continuation of the tradition Ibsen established, but with crucial differences. Where Ibsen created tightly constructed social dramas with clear plots and psychological realism, Fosse strips away plot almost entirely. His plays feature minimal action, repetitive dialogue, and long silences. Characters often say the same thing multiple times with slight variations, as if trying to approach meaning asymptotically without ever quite arriving.
Theater scholars place Fosse within the tradition of "post-dramatic theatre," a term that requires some explanation. Traditional drama presents a story: characters with goals, conflicts, resolutions. Post-dramatic theater often abandons or fragments these elements, treating the stage as a space for something other than storytelling—an exploration of presence, of language, of the theatrical medium itself. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men wait endlessly for someone who never arrives, is perhaps the most famous example.
Fosse acknowledges Beckett as an influence, one of his "elective relatives" along with the Austrian writers Georg Trakl and Thomas Bernhard. Trakl was an early twentieth-century poet whose work evokes spiritual desolation through expressionistic imagery. Bernhard was a novelist and playwright known for obsessive, spiraling monologues that attack Austrian society and culture. These are not cheerful influences.
The Rhythm of Repetition
To understand what makes Fosse's work distinctive, consider how he uses language.
His prose—he has written over seventy works including novels, poems, children's books, and essays—often reads more like poetry than traditional fiction. Sentences repeat and vary. Phrases echo and transform. The effect resembles music more than narrative, which makes sense given his early aspirations toward guitar and fiddle.
Here is how one critic described his narrative approach: hypnotic. Another noted that his writing "approaches a state of uncertainty that can open a relation to the divine." These descriptions sound abstract, perhaps even pretentious, but they capture something real about the reading experience.
Fosse himself considers poetry his primary art form, regardless of the genre he happens to be working in at any given moment. A play, a novel, an essay—all are, for him, variations on poetic practice. The distinction between forms matters less than the underlying attention to rhythm, sound, and the spaces between words.
His major prose work is Septology, a novel published in seven parts between 2019 and 2021, later collected in a single volume. The book follows an aging painter named Asle and his relationship with another man, also named Asle, whose life has taken a different path. It unfolds in a single unbroken sentence—no periods, no full stops, just an endless flow of consciousness punctuated by commas and pauses.
When the English translation of the final volumes, A New Name: Septology VI-VII, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, international critics began paying serious attention. The book was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. By the time Fosse won the Nobel the following year, he had already been mentioned as a potential laureate for a decade.
Giving Voice to the Unsayable
The Nobel citation—"for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable"—deserves unpacking.
What does it mean to give voice to something that cannot be said? The phrase sounds paradoxical, perhaps meaninglessly so. But Fosse's artistic project has always involved precisely this paradox: using language to gesture toward what language cannot capture.
His 2023 Nobel lecture, delivered at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, was titled "The Silent Language." In it, Fosse explored the difference between spoken and written language, and the function of silence in his work. When we speak, we occupy time; our words unfold in sequence, one after another, bound to the present moment. Written language operates differently—it exists all at once on the page, available for re-reading, capable of being shaped and compressed in ways speech cannot achieve.
And silence? In Fosse's plays, characters often pause. They hesitate. They say something and then say it again, slightly differently, as if the first attempt failed to capture what they meant. The gaps between utterances carry as much meaning as the words themselves.
This connects to his spiritual life, which has undergone its own dramatic transformations.
From Atheism to Catholicism
Fosse grew up in a Quaker and Pietist household, rejected religion as a young man, described himself as an atheist, struggled with alcohol, and then, in 2012 and 2013, converted to Catholicism and entered rehabilitation.
The conversion helped him stop drinking. But it also represented something deeper—a return to the spiritual territory his near-death experience at age seven had first opened. Fosse now describes writing as both confession and prayer. He practices deliberate solitude, avoiding television, radio, and even music. He keeps away from noise.
This is not mere artistic affectation. For Fosse, silence serves a spiritual function. The unsayable things his work attempts to voice include experiences of transcendence, of divine presence, of states beyond ordinary consciousness. His childhood vision of shimmering light—that moment of peace and beauty at the edge of death—never stopped mattering.
Since 2011, he has been granted use of the Grotten, an honorary residence owned by the Norwegian state and located on the grounds of the Royal Palace in Oslo. The King of Norway bestows this honor for exceptional contributions to Norwegian arts and culture. Fosse joins a lineage of Norwegian cultural figures deemed worthy of living, quite literally, under royal protection.
The Geography of Inspiration
Fosse's native region, Vestlandet—the western coast of Norway—appears constantly in his work. This is a landscape of fjords, mountains, and small coastal communities, where the sea dominates daily life and weather patterns create a particular relationship with light and darkness.
He was born in Haugesund, a city of about 35,000 people, and grew up in Strandebarm, which is even smaller. The landscape shaped his sensibility: the play of light on water, the isolation of coastal villages, the way weather arrives suddenly from the Atlantic.
Today, Fosse maintains homes in multiple locations. He owns property in Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, and two more places in western Norway. With his third wife, Anna, a Slovak woman he married in 2011, he spends time in Hainburg an der Donau in Austria—a small town near Vienna, on the Danube River, close to the borders with Slovakia and Hungary.
This European dimension matters. Fosse has been recognized across the continent. In 2003, France made him a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite, one of the country's highest honors. The Daily Telegraph once ranked him eighty-third on a list of the "Top 100 living geniuses"—a dubious distinction, perhaps, but indicative of his international reputation.
Translation and Transmission
For a writer working in Nynorsk, a language used by perhaps half a million people, translation is essential to reaching a global audience. Fosse's works have been translated into more than fifty languages.
The English translations, particularly those by Damion Searls, have been crucial to his international reception. Searls has translated most of Fosse's major prose works, including the entire Septology. The challenge of rendering Fosse's distinctive style—the repetitions, the rhythms, the endless sentences—into readable English is considerable. That the translations have succeeded well enough to earn Booker Prize shortlistings suggests real skill.
Other translators have brought Fosse to different audiences. Mohammad Hamed has translated many works into Persian, and Fosse's plays have been performed on major stages in Tehran. Sarah Cameron Sunde, an interdisciplinary artist, has translated six plays into American English and directed their American premieres in New York and Pittsburgh. May-Brit Akerholt has translated prose, essays, and poetry.
Between his own writing projects, Fosse works as a translator himself, rendering other authors' works into Nynorsk. Most recently, he wrote the libretto for an opera called Asle og Alida, composed by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen, scheduled for 2025. The protagonist's name, Asle, will be familiar to readers of Septology.
A Body of Work
Fosse's bibliography is enormous. Beyond the major novels and plays, he has written children's books with titles like Kant (illustrated, not philosophical) and Spelejenta. He has published collections of essays, including Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays), which gives some indication of his intellectual interests. He contributed as a literary consultant to Bibel 2011, a Norwegian translation of the Bible.
His prose works include early novels that established his style—Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar), Blod. Steinen er (Blood. The Stone Is)—and later works that have reached international audiences. Morgon og kveld (Morning and Evening), published in 2000, follows a life from birth to death. Det er Ales, translated as Aliss at the Fire, appeared in 2004.
The Trilogy, comprising Andvake, Olavs draumar, and Kveldsvævd, won the 2015 Nordic Council's Literature Prize—the most prestigious literary award in Scandinavia, recognizing work in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, or Swedish.
And then Septology, the culmination: seven parts published across three volumes, translated into a single 800-page English edition in 2022, described by the Nobel committee as possessing "hypnotic power."
The Surprise That Wasn't
When the Nobel Prize was announced in October 2023, Fosse told Norwegian state broadcaster NRK that he was "surprised but also not." He had been part of the speculation for a decade. He had "more and less tentatively prepared" himself for the possibility.
The critical reception was positive. Gregory Wolfe of Slant Books called him "a highly deserving Nobel laureate" and noted that readers willing to accept a brief "learning curve" adjusting to his narrative style would be "well rewarded by a writer of an almost mystical sensibility." Publisher Jacques Testard described him as "an exceptional writer, who has managed to find a totally unique way of writing fiction."
At the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 2023, Anders Olsson, chair of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee, described Fosse's narrative world as "a domain beset by the greatest anxiety and torment of indecision." His writing, Olsson said, "approaches a state of uncertainty that can open a relation to the divine."
The divine. The unsayable. The silence between words.
For a boy who once saw a shimmering light at the edge of death, who gave up rock guitar for literature, who writes in a minority language about coastal villages and spiritual uncertainty, the Nobel Prize represented not so much an arrival as a recognition of territory long inhabited. He had been writing toward the unsayable for forty years. The Swedish Academy finally noticed.
Life Beyond the Page
Fosse has been married three times. His first marriage, to a nurse named Bjørg Sissel, lasted from 1980 to 1992 and produced a son. The following year, he married Grethe Fatima Syéd, an Indian-Norwegian translator and author with whom he collaborated on several translation projects. They had two daughters and a son before separating. His current marriage, to Anna, began in 2011—the same year he was granted the Grotten residence, a coincidence of honors.
The biographical details suggest a life of considerable turbulence beneath the minimalist surface. The alcoholism. The multiple marriages. The religious conversion. The near-death experience in childhood. These are not the materials of a placid existence.
Yet Fosse's public presentation emphasizes stillness. No television. No radio. Rarely music. Writing as confession and prayer. The pursuit of solitude as spiritual discipline.
Perhaps the two patterns—the turbulence and the stillness—are not contradictory. Perhaps the stillness is what the turbulence required. Perhaps giving voice to the unsayable demands first learning to be quiet.
What Comes Next
Fosse continues to write and to receive attention.
In 2023, the same year as the Nobel, he published Kvitleik, translated into English as A Shining. In 2025, Vaim appeared. The opera Asle og Alida will premiere the same year. In 2026, his play Suzannah is scheduled for its Canadian premiere at Here For Now Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, directed by Peter Hinton-Davis, one of Canada's leading theater directors.
The work accumulates. The translations spread. The productions multiply across stages worldwide.
And somewhere in Norway, or Austria, or wherever the silence is sufficient, Jon Fosse continues to do what he has done since childhood: pursue the shimmering light, the peace and beauty glimpsed at the edge of death, the unsayable things that somehow, through repetition and rhythm and the spaces between words, become almost—almost—possible to express.