学进去

Jon Fosse has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in literature, “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. The 64-year-old playwright is not well-known outside his home country of Norway. But the author is internationally celebrated in literary circles and has been called “the most produced living playwright”.

Fosse grew up on a rural farm near Strandebarm, Norway, where his grandparents lived in one house while he, his parents, and two sisters lived in another. His father worked as a manager of Strandebarm Cooperative, a local grocery store, and his mother was a caregiver. Fosse started writing at age 12 or 13, first composing song lyrics and later trying poems.

In 1979 Fosse graduated from high school and moved to Bergen, where he began working for the newspaper Gula Tidend. That same year he became a father, and the following year he married the mother of his child. In the next decades he married twice more and had five additional children. Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s he studied at the University of Bergen, receiving a Master of Art in comparative literature in 1987.

Also during the 1980s, Fosse published his first novels, namely Red, Black, whose topic is suicide, and Stringed Guitar, about a mother in a difficult situation after locking herself out of her house where she has left her baby.

The playwright began as a novelist, and did not break through as a theater writer until he was in his 40s. His international reputation as a playwright was confirmed in 1998, with a Paris production of his first play Someone Is Going to Come, which had been written in 1992. Since then, his work has been performed in more than 60 countries around the world, according to his translator, Ann Henning Jocelyn. According to his publisher, Fosse’s work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and there have been more than 1,000 different productions of his plays.