JON FOSSE - PLAYWRIGHT

"Jon Fosse? Who is Jon Fosse? Jon Fosse has in any case three dimensions: he is an ordinary man, a public person and a writer.

The ordinary man is like most such people, with his small, more or less happy life; the public person one knows about and has in that case an impression of or doesn't know about and so has no impression of, and the writer is something that belongs to itself - it is perhaps more an activity than an identity, and it doesn't coincide, probably, either with the ordinary man or with Jon Fosse the public person. But who am I then, who is supposed to be Jon Fosse?" - Jon Fosse (Translated by Louis Muinzer).

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 in the Norwegian coastal town of Haugesund, but grew up by the fjord in Hardanger. For the past twenty years he has lived mainly in Bergen. He has a Master's degree in comparative literature, and taught at the Academy of Writing until 1992, since then he has been a professional writer and playwright.

He has written some thirty books, including the novels Red, Black, Closed Guitar, The Boathouse, The Bottle Collector, and Melancholia I-II, and volumes of poetry, among them Angel with Water in its Eyes and Dog and Angel. He has also written essays and books for children.

Since 1994 he has written a growing number of plays for the theatre, including And We'll Never Be Parted, Someone is Going to Come, Nightsongs, The Guitar Man, Dream of Autumn and Death Variations. His complete plays are being published by Oberon Books.

He has received several literary scholarships and prizes, including the Norwegian Ibsen Prize for his play The Name, and the Austrian Nestroy Prize. This year he was elected Best Foreign Playwright by Theatre Heute, the leading theatrical magazine for the German speaking countries. His books and plays have been translated into thirty languages and his plays are produced in almost every European country. His latest play, The Girl on the Sofa, premièred to great acclaim at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2002.