Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. 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’. Vaim is his tenth book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

‘For all the roaming metaphysics and magnificently recursive, hypnagogic rhythms of this one-sentence novel, it’s those passages grounded in the everyday that pop – scenes featuring meatballs and rice pudding, comparisons between American and European suitcases, Jatgeir admitting that for much of his life he had felt closer to boats than to any woman…. How can prose that is so simple – cushions are “nice”, work is “trusty” – pulse with such feeling? How can it be so littoral, incarnating the light and spray and tidal tempos of these seascapes with such power? And how can a novelist make a reader feel so lost and so found at the same time? It is strange. A strange miracle.’— Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian