In 2003, Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France. [16] He has also been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph. [17]

I had severe delirium and alcohol poisoning. I have read that thirty percent of people die from it if they don’t get treatment. Thirty percent die with treatment. At the start of The Other Name, which collects Parts I and II of Fosse’s Septology series, Asle has just finished a painting called St. Andrew’s Cross. The painting feels incomplete—when is a work of art finished?—but mostly Asle doesn’t want to look at it. It’s only two lines on a canvas. Can it be considered a painting? he wonders. Asle has few people in his life and paints for hours every day. There’s his neighbor, Åsleik, a stony fisherman who plows Asle’s driveway and asks him for paintings every Christmas, paintings that Åsleik can gift to his sister. There’s a man who lives on the edge of the sea, also named Asle, also a painter, who suffers from debilitating alcoholism. At first it’s unclear if this other Asle is real, a figment of the narrator’s imagination, an alternate version, or some combination. Asle has visions of his “doppelgänger” at home, shaking and shivering on the floor, a condition the narrator himself once endured until his wife pulled him from the brink. I met Jon Fosse at the café Dagny’s at the end of St Olav’s street in Oslo. And before we continue, I should explain who I am⁠—I have been Jon Fosse’s editor at Det Norske Samlaget, a Norwegian publishing house, since 2012. When Fosse turned fifty in 2009, my book on him⁠—Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds Jord (Jon Fosse: Poet on God’s Earth )⁠—was published. I work closely with Jon Fosse and know him well.A long time ago, a young boy pedaled with difficulty along the country road on a blue ladies’ bike, his long, dark hair fluttering behind him in the wind. Everyone in the village knew that “the kid with the hair” was Jon Olav Fosse. He might have been heading to band practice with a guitar case in hand. Or maybe he was on his way home to the family’s smallholding, not too far from the fjord and the waves. There might have been a slight drizzle on the air. In Strandebarm, one either bikes in towards or out along the fjord, on a road that winds through farmland, past smallholdings, a church, a youth club, and a bus stop. Jon Fosse grew up in Fosse, Strandebarm, during the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. He had a bike, a guitar, felt like an artistic soul, and had the longest hair that anyone in Strandebarm had ever seen on a boy.

After I had written the play I Am the Wind I went straight into writing prose. I wrote Sleepless, began Trilogy. There lies the transition from theater to prose. After I Am the Wind, I had to write the play These Eyes. It was a play I had been asked to write and I’d already agreed to it. It was tremendously difficult. Jesuislevent; Les jourss’envont/traduitdunorvégienpar Terje Sinding. –Paris :L’Arche, 2010. –Traductionde:Egervinden ;Svevn Melancholia I, del 1/forfatter: MortenCranner.Nationaltheatret, Oslo 29. april 2005.Basertpåversjonenavstykketsomblesendti NRKradioteatret18. april 2004 Lemanuscritdeschiens. II.Quellemerveille!/traduitdunorvégienpar Terje Sinding. –Paris :L’Arche, 2010. –Traductionde: Du å du Schlaflos: Erzählung/übersetztvonHinrichSchmidt-Henkel. –ReinbekbeiHamburg :Rowohlt, 2008. – Originaltitel:AndvakeJon Fosse’s life story is an unusual one, and in particular his career as a dramatist, which is a profession that he entered almost against his own will. For the young Fosse, theater seemed to be more about affectation than about art and he had no interest in entering the world of theater. The director Kai Johnsen tried several times to get Fosse to write a play. He had read Fosse’s novels and was certain that Fosse was a playwright, but Fosse adamantly declined. Still, in 1993, some ten years after Fosse was first published, he wrote a play for the first time. What made him yield? Fosse needed the money: he was broke. He wrote dialogue for the first time, the beginning of Someone is Going to Come , and found it remarkably easy. Fosse has described writing a play for the first time as “the biggest revelation in my writing career.” Melancholia II/traduitdunorvégienpar Terje Sinding. –Belval:Circé, 2002. –Traductionde:MelancholiaII Starker Wind: ein szenischesGedichtvon JonFosse:deutschsprachigeErstaufführung/Kammerspiele; Redaktion: John vonDüffel.–Berlin :DeutschesTheaterBerlin, 2021