A Silent Language

‘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

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ — Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity

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

‘Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.’ — New York Times

‘Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.’ — Nordic Council Literature Prize

‘He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue.... What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have – anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death – such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn’t matter if it is drama, poetry or prose – it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness.’ — Anders Olsson, Nobel committee

‘Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell is to W. G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary.’ — Blake Morrison, London Review of Books