Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse is a Norwegian novelist and playwright whose prose, built from simple words in long hypnotic rhythms, achieves a meditative intensity unlike anything else in contemporary literature.

Born in Haugesund, on the western coast of Norway, Fosse has lived variously on the Norwegian coast, in Oslo, and more recently in Vienna. He is among the most-performed playwrights in Europe — his spare, repetitive theatrical language has been compared to Beckett since his early plays in the 1990s — but internationally his reputation was transformed by the translation of his Septology into English by Damion Searls, published between 2019 and 2021. His Nobel Prize came in 2023, welcomed as recognition of a writer who had been known to specialists and theatre practitioners for decades.

The Septology is a seven-part novel published in three volumes — I-II, III-V, and VI-VII — following an elderly Norwegian painter named Asle over a handful of days as he thinks about his life, his faith, his deceased wife Ales, and his uncanny relationship with an alter-ego also named Asle who made different choices and is now dying of alcoholism. The prose style is unlike almost anything in contemporary fiction: long, slow, circling sentences without conventional punctuation, thoughts that return and return to the same phrases, a rhythm that creates a meditative state in the reader and makes the act of reading feel close to prayer or music. It is regularly compared to Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, though Fosse’s spiritual preoccupations — he converted to Catholicism in 2012 — give it a different register.

His earlier novels, including Melancholy I and II and Morning and Evening, are also available in English translation and reward reading. The Septology is his summit, but it is not where you are required to start.