Norway has unveiled the Jon Fosse Prize for Translators, one of Europe’s most highly endowed awards for literary translation, aiming to highlight a profession often overlooked and increasingly challenged by machine translation.
Named after Jon Fosse, the acclaimed novelist and playwright who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, this annual award will honor translators who make remarkable contributions to bringing Norwegian literature to the world. Recipients will be awarded 500,000 NOK (£36,000).
Funded by the Norwegian government and overseen by the National Library in Oslo, the prize is exclusively for translations from Norway’s two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk.
Complementing the prize, an annual Fosse lecture series will begin next April at Oslo’s Royal Palace. French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion, a distinguished member of the Académie Française, will deliver the inaugural lecture.
This initiative reflects Norway’s growing influence in global literature, with a population of just 5.5 million producing internationally acclaimed authors like Karl Ove Knausgård, Vigdis Hjorth, and Linn Ullmann. The Fosse Prize ranks among Europe’s top translation awards with substantial prize money, second only to the €50,000 Martinus Nijhoff Prize from the Netherlands, established in the 1950s.
