Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.

The Nobel Prize for Literature this year was awarded to the Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse (pictured). He has long been admired by anyone in the literary world keen to advertise their seriousness. The Canadian critic Randy Boyagoda, writing of Fosse’s Septology in the New York Times, said that he’d ‘come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude’.

The technique is to bury statements of mystic vision or horror in piles of mostly tiny and uninteresting events

Fosse is published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions, that elegant firm bringing all sorts of high-minded writers to our attention in matchy-matchy formats. The Spectator’s literary editor observed recently, very truly, that its navy spines now occupy the same chic place in bookshelves as the white spines of Picador did in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The major works available are Aliss at the Fire (a translation of Det er Ales; it was thought by Fosse’s translator Damion Searls that It’s Ales wouldn’t do), Scenes from Childhood, including some other short pieces, and Septology, a sequence of texts.