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Jon Fosse

The 2010 International Ibsen Award was given to the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse.

The Norwegian writer is one of the most prominent names in contemporary drama. Jon Fosse is hard to play and has engendered a host of suggested, more or less successful interpretations. Still, there is a growing group of directors and actors of all ages who see him as a liberating voice in a sphere where the spectacular and overly obvious gains ground. As all important writers of drama, Fosse forces the theatre and its audiences to think in new ways. He is the poet of the unknown.

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 and is from Bergen, Norway. He is an author, poet and playwright, with more than 30 plays to his credit. Since his debut in 1994, his plays have been staged more than nine hundred times across the world. Fosse has been translated into Albanian, Hebrew, Catalan, Farsi, Sami, Slovenian, Tibetan and more than 40 other languages. He has previously received a number of prizes and awards, including the Scandinavian National Theatre Award (2002), the Arts Council Norway Honorary Prize (2003) and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize (2007).