Culture | Anyone speak Nynorsk?
Lifting the veil on how literature’s most coveted award is judged reveals its arbitrariness
The announcement of the winner of the Nobel prize in literature usually prompts one of three reactions. The first is “Who?”; the second is “Why?”; the third—by far the rarest—is “Hurrah!” This year, reactions were firmly in the first two camps. On October 5th Jon Fosse, a Norwegian, was awarded the world’s most prestigious writing prize. Many literary buffs had never heard of him. Mr Fosse writes mainly in Nynorsk, a form of Norwegian which is, even among the country’s writers, a minority pursuit. His best-known (but still little-known) work is a trilogy called “Septology”, which touts itself as a “radically other reading experience”.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Prestigious, lucrative and bonkers”
From the October 14th 2023 edition
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