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Nobel Prize for Literature – Norwegian Jon Fosse is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – Culture

5 October 2023

This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse.
This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
He is being honored for his “innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unspeakable,” said the academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm.
Last year, the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux was awarded the world’s most important literary prize.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is traditionally announced as the fourth of the Nobel Prizes. The winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry had already been chosen from Monday to Wednesday.

Tomorrow, Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize will follow in the annual Nobel Prize series. This is the only one that will not be announced in the Swedish capital Stockholm, but in the Norwegian capital Oslo.

The final announcement in the economics category will take place on Monday. The prizes are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).

Scandal overcome

The Swedish Academy has been responsible for selecting Nobel Prize winners for Literature since it was first awarded in 1901. More than five years after a serious scandal involving the then academic member Katarina Frostenson and her husband Jean-Claude Arnault, who was convicted of rape, things have now largely smoothed over at the academy.

Selection of Nobel Prize winners for literature

2022: Annie Ernaux

Last year the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ernaux, who was born in Normandy in 1940, writes books about herself and her origins. She is being honored “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory,” said the committee.

Reuters/TT News Agency

2019: Peter Handke

The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the controversial Austrian Peter Handke in 2019 was not without critical comments. Although his literary competence was hardly in doubt, his critics never forgave him for radically siding with the Serbs in the Balkan wars at the end of the 1990s.

Reuters/Christian Hartmann

2016: Bob Dylan

Somewhat surprisingly, US singer/songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. The anecdotes that followed made headlines: Dylan didn’t pick up the phone from Sweden, he didn’t go to the awards ceremony in Stockholm in December. He only picked up the medal there at the beginning of April 2017.

Reuters/Ki Price

1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who died in 2014, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories in which the fantastic and the realistic unite in a richly composed fantasy world and reflect the life and conflicts of a continent,” as the Nobel Prize committee wrote.

Keystone/Mario Guzman

1954: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The US writer is considered one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. He was honored for “his mastery of the art of storytelling (…) and for the influence he has had on contemporary style.” Hemingway died in 1961 at the age of 61.

Nobel Foundation Archives

1953: Winston Churchill

The British Prime Minister from 1940-1945 and 1951-1955 was also a successful political author – and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. The Nobel Prize Committee cited Churchill’s “mastery of historical and biographical description as well as his brilliant oratory in defending high human values.”

Nobel Foundation Archives

1946: Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany, but later lived in Switzerland and was ultimately a citizen of Basel and Bern – in this respect, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1946 is considered Swiss. He was honored “for his inspired writings that (…) illustrate classic humanitarian ideals and high stylistic qualities.”

Nobel Foundation Archives

1919: Carl Spitteler

The Swiss Carl Spitteler received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919. Spitteler is the only Swiss native to have ever received this honor. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the prize “in special recognition of his epic ‘Olympic Spring'”.

Nobel Foundation Archives

Since then, women and men have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature alternately: the Polish Olga Tokarczuk received the prize, which was rescheduled for 2018, in parallel with the German Peter Handke, who was awarded in 2019 – and not without controversy.

Surprising prize winners

In 2020 and 2021, two surprising winners followed, the US poet Louise Glück and the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, before the Academy agreed on the world writer Ernaux in 2022 – a choice that received a lot of approval from the literary world.

Nobel Prize medal.

The Frenchwoman 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 said at the time.