Jon Fosse will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
The Norwegian author will receive the world’s most important literary prize for his innovative plays and prose – in doing so he “gives a voice to the unspeakable,” said the academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm, at the award announcement in Stockholm’s old town.
Literary expert Scheck: Fosse is “an excellent choice”
German literary critic Denis Scheck welcomes the news. “I’m happy for him. I think it’s an excellent choice,” Scheck told the German Press Agency. “This is anything but a Scandinavian home game, but real world literature.” Fosse was an author who found new forms of expression for human loneliness and “a kindred spirit of Samuel Beckett,” Scheck said.
Last year, the Swedish Academy chose the French writer Annie Ernaux as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She received the Nobel Prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory,” as the Academy praised her at the time. Ernaux was only the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel Prize winners in literature to date. In recent years, the award has alternated between men and women.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced every year as the fourth Nobel Prize. The winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry had already been chosen from Monday to Wednesday. Tomorrow the Nobel Peace Prize will follow, which will be the only one to be announced not in the Swedish capital Stockholm, but in the Norwegian capital Oslo. The final announcement in the economics category will take place on Monday.
The Nobel Prizes are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This year, the awards are worth eleven million Swedish crowns (around 950,000 euros) per category. That is one million crowns more than last year.
