By Maya Landau 

Born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, Jon Fosse is a writer, playwright, and poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. Fosse is only the fourth Norwegian to win this award, with the first three being Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Knut Hamson, and Sigrid Undset. Fosse has won many awards over the years and was even made a knight in France’s National Order of Merit, the most distinguished award for non-French nationals. He won the Nobel Prize last year because of his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” 

Sixty-five year old Jon Fosse was born on September 29th, 1959. He was raised in the small community of Strandebarm near one of the largest fjords in Norway, the Hardanger Fjord. Most of Norway, especially where Fosse grew up, is remote. The natural setting of his childhood is reflected in the natural settings of his books, particularly in his book A Shining, which follows a man whose car has broken down on the side of the road far from civilization. The man ventures into the forest and has an out of body spiritual experience, reflecting Fosse’s own complicated relationship with religion.  

Fosse grew up Quaker, but as a child experienced an out of body moment himself when he accidentally sliced an artery in his wrist with a piece of broken glass. In an interview, Fosse said about the incident, “I saw myself from the outside, in a kind of shimmering light.” This experience, which brought him close to death, is what truly brought the mystical world to him later in life and has heavily influenced his writing.  

Despite having grown up Quaker, Fosse became an atheist in his twenties while writing his earliest works. He didn’t have much acclaim until he switched his medium to playwriting, a form of writing he hadn’t cared for until the 1990’s. By the early 2000s, Fosse’s plays had become quite well known in the European theater world. While Fosse was overjoyed with the newfound attention, he began to slip under the pressure and began to cope with alcohol. He claimed that by 2012 he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, resulting in alcohol poisoning and time in a hospital. Once he had recovered, Fosse made a vow to stop drinking and converted to Catholicism.   

In his studies of philosophy, Fosse became aware that there are two sides to everything, a theoretical side and an artistic side. He chose to follow the artistic side, as one can see in his musical prose that is present throughout his novels, poetry, and plays. As if creating a vase on a pottery wheel, Fosse molds his book Aliss at the Fire out of the rambling minds of a bored man and a grieving woman. In this way, Fosse creates something alive, something that he calls his “protection.” Fosse started writing at the age of fourteen after a childhood with no interest in writing and a strong love and interest for rock music. At fourteen he gave up music and began to write poetry and and stories, entranced by the power it gave him. For Fosse, writing gave him a “secret place, a shelter, a place only for him.”

Fosse explained writing as a task of listening and nothingness. His writing moves through all aspects of the writing spectrum, following multiple genres and themes. He believes there must be “contradictions in drama to keep it alive,” which is why even his darkest works have an element of beauty to them. For example, one of his more famous plays, Death Variations, follows a young girl who has committed suicide. The play begins at her death and works its way back through the day. In an email to Fosse, a woman who saw the play performed expressed how she was suicidal herself, but Death Variations saved her.  

This is just one example of how Fosse’s writing has affected people. After the publication of his renowned Septology series, Fosse has returned to writing plays, with the most recent being In the Black Forest, published in 2023.