Jon Fosse

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest....

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their...

Trilogy is Jon Fosse's critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable...

Fosse has been shortlisted by oddsmakers for the Nobel Prize several years in a row: "It isn't every playwright who gets a hotel suite named after them, particularly when they're still breathing. But Fosse is no ordinary playwright. One of Norway's most famous writers, he is also perhaps Europe's most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 In the title work, a loosely autobiographical narrative covers infancy to awkward adolescence, unearthing the moments of childhood that linger longest in the imagination. In And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me, a haunting and dream-like novella, a dispute between neighbours escalates to an inexorable climax. Taken from various sources,...

'If there's any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening,' says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they...

Fosse: Plays Two includes A Summer's Day, Dream of Autumn, and Winter. These three seasonal plays are typical of Fosse, imbuing apparently mundane situations with an almost hypnotic intensity. In A Summer's Day, an old widow remembers the day, many years before, when her husband went out to sea in a terrible storm. In a series of continuous but chronologically...

Fosse: Plays One includes the plays Someone is Going to Come, The Guitar Man, The Name, and The Child. In Someone is Going to Come, the two of them want to be together, just the two of them, so they leave the city and buy a remote house by the sea. But is it possible to do what they want...

Jon Fosse has been called ‘the Beckett of the 21st century’ (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ‘Waiting for Godot without the gags’. Just as Beckett’s plays — and those of all great playwrights — grew out of their time, influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward,...

A young man lives alone with his mother and his beloved dog in a house in a small village overlooking the fjord. The dog has run off and gone missing. This has never happened before... In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the direction of their future. Fosse’s drama explores life lived in unexpected...

A girl on the verge of adulthood is sitting on a sofa. She is unhappy: she resents her mother and older sister and longs for her absent father, a sailor. What is she going to do with her life? She considers becoming a painter... A woman approaching middle age is painting a self-portrait. She is watching her younger self: the...

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button, but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to...

The celebrated Norwegian novelist's magnum opus, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, published in one volume for the first time. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are...

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is...

Jon Fosse said farewell to theory early in his career, choosing poetry, fiction, and drama as his mediums of choice. Here, however, in a selection from his two books of essays, we see just how incisive a critic and memoirist he can be. Not only including a generous portion of Fosse's writing on literature and theatre—including the irresistible "Thomas Bernhard...

Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig's mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, Hertervig is...

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their...