Leseratte
Well-known member
Very interesting cover!
Nobel Prize in Literature 2023
- Thread starter tiganeasca
- Start date
Phil D
Well-known member
If Damion Searls is reading the Nobel speculation thread then he probably also read the Wolfie thread, which means there's a chance that he might have even told Fosse that he won the Wolfie. Jon Fosse might know he won the Wolfie!
(And Damion, if you haven't told him yet, please tell Jon that he won the Wolfie!)
(And Damion, if you haven't told him yet, please tell Jon that he won the Wolfie!)
Leseratte
Well-known member
Anyway, this is a stimulus for continuing to produce nice, personalized diplomas on the chance that the winner or someone related to him may have a look at the forum.
Bartleby
Moderator
Leseratte
Well-known member
That´s a very nice letter. But has its authenticity been verified? It could have been accidentally leaked from
Stevie´s hoard of celebrity letters, for example. This small signature looks so unpapal.?
Bartleby
Moderator
Jon Fosse's Nobel lecture can be read here.
Benny Profane
Well-known member
Live broadcasting:
Ben Jackson
Well-known member
While not as brilliant as Bertrand Russell's or Claude Simon's Lectures, I believe Fosse's Nobel Lecture is very beautiful. One of the best moments of the lecture was when he mentioned his readers reactions to his works. It kind of reminded me of when Soyinka said his greatest happiness was not winning the Nobel Prize but seeing his works coming to live on stage and capturing successfully the essence of life. Great writing is not just about winning the prizes, especially a prize with stature of Nobel, but exploring beautifully the heart of the matter (essence of existence).
Bartleby
Moderator
Fosse has just received his Nobel medal from the hands of the Swedish king, and now the award ceremony speech by Anders Olsson is available on the Nobel Prize website.
Leseratte
Well-known member
As it is not long and very much to the point, I reproduce Anders Olson's speech here:
Your Majesties, Esteemed Nobel Prize Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen,
To enter the world of Jon Fosse is to set foot in a domain beset by the greatest anxiety and torment of indecision. His rich oeuvre revolves around the disorientation of the individual and the difficulties experienced in finding a path in life. Whether in prose, drama or poetry, his writing approaches a state of uncertainty that can open a relation to the divine. With commonplace words here seeming inadequate, Fosse’s rare quality is that he succeeds, as the award citation reads, in ‘giving voice to the unsayable’.
Early on in his authorship, Fosse captures the unsayable in his short prose piece I Couldn’t Say It to You from 1991. Here we meet an old man who is unable to rid himself of the vivid memory of something he has failed to say to his beloved throughout all their years together. He has not forgotten the look in her eyes as she sits alone at a table in the school cafeteria, a memory that remains lodged in his mind from that day forward. This is the case even on her deathbed; words and life have drifted apart. But when Fosse allows the old man to voice the unsaid, the impossible is transformed into both a touching elegy and a triumph over speechlessness.
In the late masterpiece Septology, completed in 2021, the main character Asle is an elderly artist who, in the spirit of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, turns in prayer to a God beyond all concepts and ideas. Both in the previously mentioned early piece and here in this later novel, the protagonist is nevertheless filled with an anxiety which creates a tension between the mundane and the divine. It is this anxiety that lends the work its internal drama.
Jon Fosse is not a difficult writer. He uses the simplest of words and writes about experiences to which we can all relate: separation, death and the vulnerability of love. Any difficulty with Fosse rather concerns our readiness to open ourselves to the existential uncertainty upon which he constantly touches. But the fact that he is one of today’s most widely performed playwrights indicates that this is a torment shared by many.
What is remarkable about Fosse’s simplicity is that it gains depth and intensity through repetition and variation. In his harrowing early novel Closed Guitar, in which a mother locks herself out of her flat and becomes separated from her baby daughter, a sense of panic merges into the language form. In the shimmering world of Morning and Evening, anxiety turns to wonder and profound consolation as an old man named Johannes awakes one morning to find he is dying and begins to lose his sense of reality. In Septology, the rolling prose devoid of sentence breaks becomes one with the painter Asle’s wandering thoughts, drawing in the reader with hypnotic power.
Either Fosse focuses on the unsayable, as in these works, or he chooses the language of silence, as in his radical renewal of world drama during the 1990s. Beginning with Someone Is Going to Come, the play with which he made his international breakthrough, he discovers the possibility of allowing speechlessness to materialize on stage. In the theatre, all that is internal must be revealed, and what cannot be said must too be given a voice. This is demonstrated in a long series of emotionally charged plays that includes The Name, Dream of Autumn and Death Variations. Here, time expands to allow the dead to take their place on stage.
Jon Fosse is the first Nobel Prize laureate in Literature to write in Nynorsk and, like his great Norwegian predecessor Tarjei Vesaas, he combines strong local ties with a belief in the possibilities of contemporary literature. He shies away from what we might consider to be definitive wording, making it almost impossible to quote him. As such, he is the master of ambivalence and of the unresolved. In his world, uncertainty pulses with a secret light.
Dear Jon Fosse, allow me to convey the warm congratulations of the Swedish Academy, while asking you to step forward to receive from the hand of his Majesty the King the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Translation: Chris Hall"
"Award ceremony speech
English
Presentation Speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Member of the Swedish Academy, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, 10 December 2023.Your Majesties, Esteemed Nobel Prize Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen,
To enter the world of Jon Fosse is to set foot in a domain beset by the greatest anxiety and torment of indecision. His rich oeuvre revolves around the disorientation of the individual and the difficulties experienced in finding a path in life. Whether in prose, drama or poetry, his writing approaches a state of uncertainty that can open a relation to the divine. With commonplace words here seeming inadequate, Fosse’s rare quality is that he succeeds, as the award citation reads, in ‘giving voice to the unsayable’.
Early on in his authorship, Fosse captures the unsayable in his short prose piece I Couldn’t Say It to You from 1991. Here we meet an old man who is unable to rid himself of the vivid memory of something he has failed to say to his beloved throughout all their years together. He has not forgotten the look in her eyes as she sits alone at a table in the school cafeteria, a memory that remains lodged in his mind from that day forward. This is the case even on her deathbed; words and life have drifted apart. But when Fosse allows the old man to voice the unsaid, the impossible is transformed into both a touching elegy and a triumph over speechlessness.
In the late masterpiece Septology, completed in 2021, the main character Asle is an elderly artist who, in the spirit of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, turns in prayer to a God beyond all concepts and ideas. Both in the previously mentioned early piece and here in this later novel, the protagonist is nevertheless filled with an anxiety which creates a tension between the mundane and the divine. It is this anxiety that lends the work its internal drama.
Jon Fosse is not a difficult writer. He uses the simplest of words and writes about experiences to which we can all relate: separation, death and the vulnerability of love. Any difficulty with Fosse rather concerns our readiness to open ourselves to the existential uncertainty upon which he constantly touches. But the fact that he is one of today’s most widely performed playwrights indicates that this is a torment shared by many.
What is remarkable about Fosse’s simplicity is that it gains depth and intensity through repetition and variation. In his harrowing early novel Closed Guitar, in which a mother locks herself out of her flat and becomes separated from her baby daughter, a sense of panic merges into the language form. In the shimmering world of Morning and Evening, anxiety turns to wonder and profound consolation as an old man named Johannes awakes one morning to find he is dying and begins to lose his sense of reality. In Septology, the rolling prose devoid of sentence breaks becomes one with the painter Asle’s wandering thoughts, drawing in the reader with hypnotic power.
Either Fosse focuses on the unsayable, as in these works, or he chooses the language of silence, as in his radical renewal of world drama during the 1990s. Beginning with Someone Is Going to Come, the play with which he made his international breakthrough, he discovers the possibility of allowing speechlessness to materialize on stage. In the theatre, all that is internal must be revealed, and what cannot be said must too be given a voice. This is demonstrated in a long series of emotionally charged plays that includes The Name, Dream of Autumn and Death Variations. Here, time expands to allow the dead to take their place on stage.
Jon Fosse is the first Nobel Prize laureate in Literature to write in Nynorsk and, like his great Norwegian predecessor Tarjei Vesaas, he combines strong local ties with a belief in the possibilities of contemporary literature. He shies away from what we might consider to be definitive wording, making it almost impossible to quote him. As such, he is the master of ambivalence and of the unresolved. In his world, uncertainty pulses with a secret light.
Dear Jon Fosse, allow me to convey the warm congratulations of the Swedish Academy, while asking you to step forward to receive from the hand of his Majesty the King the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Translation: Chris Hall"