2023-10-11 11:03:41
Bilal Ramadan wrote Wednesday, October 11, 2023 02:00 PM
Last week, the Norwegian novelist and playwright John Foss He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2023, “for his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable.” No one was overly surprised – John Foss has long been considered a worthy contender for the award, and his work has often been praised in his native Norway and internationally.
Last year, when Foss’s new book, Septology VI-VII, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the media asked him to tell them regarding the best or worst writing advice he had ever received.
Norwegian John Foss won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2023
Then John Foss said: I think the best advice I have learned from life is to listen to yourself, not to others. Stick to what you have, not to what you want to have or wish you had. Stay close to yourself, your inner voice, your vision, and how you want writing to be.
John Foss added: When I published my first novel, it got a lot of bad reviews, and it haunted me. If I had listened to it, I would have stopped writing, but instead I decided to listen to myself instead, to what I know. Since then, this has become a kind of… The norm for me.
Nobel Prize medals
John Foss continued: Of course this goes both ways. For several years now, my writing has been well received, and I’ve won many awards and so on, but I try not to let that affect my writing in any way. Good reaction or bad reaction: it doesn’t matter. I stick to what I know, what I feel I need to write, and what I can do, not what I want to do. For example, my plays achieved great success, but I decided to stop writing plays, and I stopped for many years. Instead I went back to where I started, writing my own kind of stories and poetry.
1697023813
#John #Foss #winner #Nobel #Prize #Literature #advice #received #writing
