A Silent Language: Jon Fosse's Nobel Lecture

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’ — Le Monde

‘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 disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity and existential uncertainty of the human experience. ‘It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,’ he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. ‘Maybe.’

‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.’ — Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement