Norwegian novelist and dramatist Jon Fosse has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2023, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday.

Fosse has been awarded the Nobel Prize “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.

The Nobel Prize Academy honoured Fosse’s body of work written in Norwegian Nynorsk including several plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.

While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognised for his prose, the Academy said.

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish krona ($915,000) and is regarded widely as the world’s most prestigious literary award. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 116 times to 120 Nobel laureates between 1901 and 2023.

Nominations and deliberations for all Nobel prizes are kept confidential, but ahead of the Prize betting sites gave high odds to Fosse, Chinese fiction writer Can Xue and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The names of Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon were also doing the rounds with the bookies.

In recent years, the prizes have gone to French author Annie Ernaux (2022), Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021), American poet and essayist Louise Glück ( 2020) and Austrian writer Peter Handke ( 2019).

The list of famous winners from yesteryears includes: WB Yeats (1923), GB Shaw (1925) Herman Hesse ( 1946), TS Eliot( 1948), Pablo Neruda ( 1971) and Gabriel García Márquez (1982).

Each year, since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been announced for achievements in the sciences, literature and peace. The Prize was established in the will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite.

Source Indian Express

BDST: 1729 HRS, OCT 5, 2023
MSK