Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most important contemporary writers, since his 1983 fiction debut he has published prose, poetry and over forty plays. Fosse has been awarded a lifetime stipend by the Norwegian government among countless other accolades, and is one of the most performed living playwrights today. He was the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator of German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. His translations include work by Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf; his translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction.
“What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are.” (Bergens Tidende) “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.” (The New York Times)