Norwegian author Jon Fosse wins 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”, the award-giving body said on Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million).

This year’s literature laureate Jon Fosse writes novels heavily pared down to a style that has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’, said the Nobel Prize panel.

Over the years, the literature prize has also picked winners well beyond the novelist tradition, including playwrights, historians, philosophers and poets, even breaking new ground with the award to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.

Last year's Nobel was won by one of the main favourites, author Annie Ernaux, for her largely autobiographical books examining memory and social inequality, making her the first French woman to win the world's most prestigious literary award.

"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, who is also a poet, said in a statement.

Fosse, 64, who writes in the least common of the two official versions of Norwegian, said he regarded the award as a recognition of this language and the movement promoting it, and that he ultimately owed the prize to the language itself.

Known as "new Norwegian" and used by only about 10% of the country's population, Fosse's version of the language was developed in the 19th century with rural dialects at its base, making it an alternative to the dominant use of Danish that followed from a 400-year union with Denmark.

In addition to more than two dozen plays, the prolific writer has also published novels, essays, collections of poetry and a string of children's books over a period of four decades.

According to his publisher, Fosse's work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and there have been more than 1,000 different productions of his plays.