Scenes from a Childhood - Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

Scenes from a Childhood is the latest collection of stories by Jon Fosse, one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, famed for the minimalist and unsettling quality of his writing. In the title work, a loosely autobiographical narrative covers infancy to awkward adolescence, unearthing the moments of childhood that linger longest in the imagination. In 'And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me', a haunting and dream-like novella, a dispute between neighbours escalates to an inexorable climax. Taken from various sources, the texts gathered here together for the first time demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Fosse's imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works.

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.

ISBN: 9781910695531
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: May 05, 2018

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’

— Le Monde ‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle ‘Jon Fosse is less well-known in America than some other Norwegian novelists, but revered in Norway – winner of every prize, a leading Nobel contender. I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all... His writing is pure poetry.’

— Paris Review, from an essay by the translator ‘Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.’

— New York Times ‘With its heavy silences and splintered dialogue, his work has reminded some of Beckett, others of Pinter.’