Morning and Evening
Jon Fosse
Original title: Morgon og kveld
Publisher: Samlaget, 2000
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 117 pages
A child is born; he will be named Johannes, and will be a fisherman. An old man dies; his name is Johannes, he was a fisherman. This novel, written with the concentrated power of poetry, spans these two extremes of a human life, its language entering into the very process of being born and that of dying, when everything remains the same and yet is completely different. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
Foreign rights
Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Awards
Some few prizes of many:
2010 International Ibsen Prize
2014 European Prize for Literature
2015 Nordic Council’s Literature Award, for Trilogy
2016 Willy Brandt Prize
2017 European Poetry Prize of the City of Münster, Germany