A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture

Jon Fosse is one of Norway’s most celebrated authors and playwrights. He was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Red, Black, Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages. A New Name—the third and final volume of Septology—was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International Booker Prize. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.