Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, on Norway’s west coast, and grew up in Strandebarm on the Hardangerfjord, in a family shaped by Quaker and pietist faith. A serious accident at seven brought him close to death, an experience he has described as fundamental to his becoming a writer. As a teenager he played guitar and fiddle and wrote his own lyrics. He studied comparative literature at the University of Bergen, began writing in Nynorsk, Norway’s minority written standard, and published his first novel, Red, Black, in 1983.

For a decade he wrote prose and poetry before turning to the theatre; his first play was staged in 1994, and Someone Is Going to Come and the dramas that followed made him, after Ibsen, the most performed Norwegian playwright. The plays are sparse and rhythmic, built from repetition, pauses and simple words that leave the essential unspoken. His fiction works in the same register: Melancholy enters the mind of the painter Lars Hertervig, Morning and Evening compresses a fisherman’s birth and death into a few pages, and the Septology, written as a single unbroken sentence across seven parts, follows an ageing painter and his double through Advent on the coast near Bergen. Spiritual questions, increasingly Christian ones, run through all of it.

He joined the Catholic Church in 2012–13. Since 2011 he has held the Grotten, an honorary residence in the grounds of the Royal Palace in Oslo. The Nobel Prize in 2023 honoured his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable; he was the first laureate writing in Nynorsk.