Lecture and prize in honour of Jon Fosse
Lecture and prize in honour of Jon Fosse
French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has agreed to hold the first annual Fosse Lecture in April 2025. The lecture will take place at the Royal Palace in Oslo, Norway. At the same event, the Fosse Prize for Translators will be presented to German translator Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel.
In honour of Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, the Norwegian government has asked the National Library of Norway to arrange an annual Fosse Lecture and an annual Fosse Prize for Translators.
The first lecture and award ceremony will take place at the Royal Palace in Oslo on 24 April 2025. Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit is patron of both the Fosse Lecture and the Fosse Prize for Translators.
The Fosse Lecture
The Fosse Lecture is intended to present new perspectives on literature, with the goal of stimulating public literary discourse in Norway and abroad. The lecturer is not required to speak about Jon Fosse and does not have to be familiar with his work or refer to him during their talk. It is literary thought and discussion itself that is the focus of the lecture – in keeping with the spirit and works of Jon Fosse himself. The lecture must be original and written especially for the occasion.
Jean-Luc Marion
The first holder of the Fosse Lecture will be the French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946). Marion is considered to be one of the truly great thinkers of our time. He studied under Jacques Derrida at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1960s, and has subsequently dedicated his career to the study of phenomenology and theology. He is particularly interested in topics such as love, the gift and God as phenomenon, and has a deep love of literature. In his Jon Fosse Lecture, Marion will speak about literature from his unique perspective.
The Fosse Prize for Translators
The Fosse Prize for Translators is intended to celebrate a person who has devoted considerable time to translating Norwegian literature into other languages. The Fosse Prize for Translators will honour the art of translating and underscore the vital role translators play in bringing Norwegian literature out into the world. With a value of NOK 500,000, the Fosse Prize for Translators is one of the largest of its kind worldwide.
Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel (b. 1959), a renowned German translator working in Berlin, will be the first to receive the Fosse Prize for Translators. He has been translating literature from Norwegian, Danish, French and Italian into German since 1987. Schmidt-Henkel has a strong connection to Norwegian literature, having translated a number of Norwegian authors, such as Kjell Askildsen, Jon Fosse, Henrik Ibsen, Cecilie Løveid, Tarjei Vesaas and Ruth Lillegraven.