Jon Fosse delivered his lecture accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, two months after he was announced as the winner of the award “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”
The author and playwright, is the first Norwegian writer to win the award since Sigrid Undset took home the prize in 1928. His works published in the U.S. include Melancholy, translated by Grethe Kvernes and Damion Searls, and a trilogy of books titled Septology, composed of The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name, all translated by Searls.
Fosse gave his speech during a ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The Nobel Prize website posted an English translation of his lecture, which began with an anecdote about a panic attack he suffered as a child when asked by one of his teachers to read aloud.
“In a way it was as if the fear took my language from me, and that I had to take it back, so to speak,” he said. “And if I were to do that, it couldn’t be on other people’s terms, but on my own. I started to write my own texts, short poems, short stories. And I discovered that doing so, gave me a sense of safety, gave me the opposite of fear. In a way I found a place inside myself that was just mine, and from that place I could write what was just mine.”
He closed his lecture by noting that he has frequently written about suicide, saying he was “touched” by hearing from readers who told him that his work saved their lives.
“In a sense I have always known that writing can save lives, perhaps it has even saved my own life,” he said. “And if my writing also can help to save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
