"His huge oeuvre, spanning a variety of genres, comprises about 40 plays and a wealth of novels, poetry collections, essays, children's books and translations," said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee for literature. "Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism." "I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations," Fosse said in a statement.
He also told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that he was "surprised but also not" to have won.
"I've been part of the discussion for 10 years and have more and less tentatively prepared myself that this could happen," he said.
Jacques Testard, Fosse's fiction publisher, said on hearing the news: "He is an exceptional writer, who has managed to find a totally unique way of writing fiction. As his Norwegian editor Cecilie Seiness put it recently in an interview: if you open any book by Jon and read a couple of lines, it couldn't be written by anyone else.
This story is from the October 06, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the October 06, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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