Jon Fosse’s war on convention

Jon Fosse’s war on convention

Jon Fosse, a novelist and a playwright and one of Norway’s best-known living writers, was born into a family of Quakers and Pietists in 1959. This religious formation is important for Fosse. At the age of seven, he had an accident that resulted in a near-death experience whose qualities – luminosity and a sense of peace – are in part responsible, Fosse has said, for his being a writer. But surely his sense of what those qualities were arises, re…