Jon Fosse

Fosse nearly died at age seven in a household accident, an experience of leaving and re-entering his body that he later traced directly into the visionary, boundary-dissolving quality of his fiction. He wrote poetry and novels through his twenties before turning mostly to theater in the 1990s, becoming one of the most staged living playwrights in Europe, produced in dozens of languages though his best-known plays remain sparsely translated into English.

He writes in Nynorsk, the rural minority form of written Norwegian, and battled alcoholism for years before converting to Catholicism in his fifties, a turn that shaped the meditative faith running through Septology (2019-21), his seven-volume, single-sentence late masterpiece. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.