Do we like them?

Do we like Jon Fosse?

Our score: 7 out of 10. No harmful words, acts or company found and a decent record, but he says little publicly on people or the planet, so we can't go higher.

Jon Fosse is the Norwegian writer who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the sort of author who writes a whole novel in one unbroken sentence and still gets staged around the world. He writes in Nynorsk and grew up on Norway's west coast, which is where his plain, quiet style comes from.

His path wasn't glamorous. He told the Irish Times he was a Marxist and an atheist in the 1970s, that his first novel copped plenty of bad reviews, and that he kept writing anyway. He later taught creative writing for around six years, and Karl Ove Knausgård was one of his students. He spent about seven years living near Vienna, where he wrote the huge Septology.

On the harm test, we found nothing. There were no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, no conspiracy talk, and no culture-war grifting in the coverage we read. We also found no sign he has worked with or promoted anyone who pushes harm. The honest catch is that he rarely says anything on those topics at all, so this is an absence of harm, not a record of loud allyship.

Faith is a big part of his story, and it counts in his favour here, not against. He left the Lutheran church at 16 and later joined the Catholic Church. He still describes himself as a practising Catholic who sees things through a Quaker lens. In a 2024 interview he said each and every human being has a unique value, which is a decent line to build a life on.

Nobody has sued him, and our searches turned up no allegations, court cases or reports of him mistreating staff or colleagues. His good stuff is mostly the work itself, and he says in his Nobel lecture that he hopes writing can save lives. In Stockholm he said that writing can save lives, and perhaps even saved his own. That is not charity, and we found no records of donations either, so we're not inflating it.

Nothing is brewing in the news this year beyond new productions of his plays. So he's a quiet, thoughtful bloke who writes about the human condition and keeps out of the culture wars. We'd happily back him, with the caveat that we don't know where he stands on the things we care about most.