A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture

By Jon Fosse and Damion Searls

The essential lecture delivered by the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Literature, published for the first time in a collectible edition.

“If there’s any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening,” says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity, and existential uncertainty of the human experience. “It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,” he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. “Maybe.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Transit Books
• Release date: Apr 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798893389081

Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.

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Cover: A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture by Jon Fosse

PRAISE FOR JON FOSSE

"Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: ‘It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.’ None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? ‘He is the most destructive writer I know,’ Fosse claims. ‘I feel that there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.’"

—Merve Emre, The New Yorker

An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself . . . The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career.

—Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times

"In The Other Name’s rhythmic accumulation of words, [there is] something incantatory and self-annihilating— something that feels almost holy."

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street