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Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2023, considered that “writing can save lives,” pointing out – during a lecture yesterday, Thursday, prior to receiving his award – to the many cases of suicide that he addresses in his writings.
“If my writing can also help save the lives of others, then nothing else will make me happier,” the playwright said at a conference in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, days before the Nobel Prize ceremony on Sunday.
The author admitted that there were more cases of suicide in his works than he would like. He added, “I feared that in this way I had helped legitimize suicide.”
But he recounted that readers also assured him that his writings “simply saved their lives” after he announced that he had won the Nobel Prize, indicating that he was greatly affected by these testimonies.
He added, “I knew in a sense that writing could save lives, and perhaps it saved my life as well.”
Vosse receives his award, accompanied by a medal and 11 million Swedish krona ($1.05 million) from King Carl XVI Gustav, on the anniversary of the death of the scientist and inventor Alfred Nobel in 1896.
The Swedish Academy, which awards the award, said it chose him “for his innovative plays and prose that give voice to what cannot be said.”
The Academy added that Fosse’s works “combine the nature of his Norwegian background with literary artistic technique,” and praised him for “revealing human anxiety and the contradiction in human essence” in his nearly 40 works.
She stated that Fosse is considered one of the most widely performed plays in the world, and that he is becoming more famous day by day for his prose works.
Fosse writes in the Nynushk language (one of the new forms of writing the Norwegian language), and his characters live in abstract poetic worlds experiencing a cold and harsh reality similar to the famous epics of northern Europe. His characters speak little in his texts, but they reveal their hidden feelings.
Fosse emerged as a playwright on the European stage, thanks to his play “Someone is Coming Home,” which was directed by Claude Régier in 1999 in Paris.
Fosse writes in an easy manner and in a style that has become known among critics as “Fosse’s simplicity.” He pauses in his works at critical moments in daily life. In his second novel, for example, he pauses at the hesitation of a young mother who leaves her apartment to throw out the trash, but she closes the door on her child inside, and finds herself in Confusing situation.
