CATHOLIC NOBLE PRIZE WINNER- 2023

This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to a Norwegian novelist and playwright who became a Catholic later in life (2012). JON FOSSE, while unknown outside Europe, was selected for his wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations, "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."   The Nobel committee called him “one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world.” His works have been translated into over 50 languages.

It was a series of novels that Jon Fosse began writing after his conversion that brought him to the attention of readers in the English-speaking world.

In regards to his conversion, Jon Fosse told a New Yorker interviewer:

I had a kind of religious turn in my life that had to do with entering this unknown. I was an atheist, but I couldn’t explain what happened when I wrote, what made it happen. Where does it come from? I couldn’t answer it. You can always explain the brain in a scientific way, but you can’t catch the light, or the spirit, of it. It’s something else."

He also credits his conversion to Catholicism with helping him in his struggles with alcoholism and anxiety.

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, and grew up in Strandebarm. His family were Quakers and Pietists,  which he credits with shaping his spiritual views.  A serious accident at age seven brought him close to death. This experience significantly influenced his writing in adulthood. He started writing around the age of twelve, despite his claims that he was not very concerned with books and much of his teenage writing practice involved creating his own lyrics for musical pieces.

He was interested in becoming a rock guitarist, but once he began to dedicate more time to writing, he gave up his musical ambitions.  He gained a master's degree in comparative literature in 1987 from the University of Bergen. 

Gregory Wolfe, the publisher and editor of the imprint Slant Books wrote: (as told to Aleteia):

Jon Fosse is a highly deserving Nobel laureate in literature. While he has been a widely produced playwright, his renown has spread in recent years through his fiction, including the masterful Septology. While his style may not be to everyone’s taste, it is not because he is intellectual or political. In fact, Fosse’s prose has been compared to liturgy: it uses a lot of simple words and images and repetition to evoke memory, longing, and a spiritual search. And indeed as a convert to the Catholic Church he includes prayer directly into stories. Readers willing to accept the brief “learning curve” of adjusting to his narrative style will be well rewarded by a writer of an almost mystical sensibility.

Septology is a series of  seven novels about  the aging painter Asle, a widower, who over the course of seven days tries to make sense of religion, identity, art, and family life, with strong autobiographical undercurrents, including a literary tribute to Jon ’s late first wife and his own work as a painter. The daring work is written as one extraordinarily long run-on sentence. “You don’t read my books for the plots,” Fosse once told an interviewer. 

He refers to his writing style as “slow prose” and as “mystical realism.” Jon Fosse is the second Norwegian Catholic to win the Prize for Literature, the first being (one of my favorite authors), SIGRID UNDSET.