(Stockholm) “Writing can save lives,” said Norwegian Jon Fosse, 2023 Nobel Prize winner in literature, on Thursday, speaking in a conference before the award ceremony of the numerous suicides appearing in his writings.
“If my writing can also help save other people’s lives, nothing would make me happier,” the playwright said at a conference in Stockholm, ahead of Sunday’s Nobel Prize ceremony.
The author admitted that there were more suicides in his works than he “likes to think.” “I was afraid that in this way I had helped legitimize suicide,” Mr. Fosse said.
But readers also told him that his writings “simply saved their lives” after the announcement of his Nobel Prize, he said, claiming to have been very touched by these testimonies.
“In a sense, I always knew that writing could save lives, maybe it even saved mine,” he added.
The Swedish Academy announced in October that it had recognized the 64-year-old writer “for his innovative plays and prose, which gave voice to the unspeakable.”
Sometimes compared to Samuel Beckett, another Nobel Prize-winning playwright, Jon Fosse ignores the plot, reduced to a strict minimum, and uses a simple and stripped-down language where the key to understanding is in the rhythm, the musicality and the breaks.
Jon Fosse will receive his prize, along with a medal and 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million), from King Carl XVI Gustaf on the anniversary of the scientist and inventor’s death in 1896 Alfred Nobel.
