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

“Morning and Evening is a simple story about life’s most important questions—in fact, about nothing less than the meaning of life itself. Fosse conveys his speculations in profound and truly gripping language. It is almost impossible not to be brought deep into Johannes the fisherman’s world.”

Tone Solberg, Dagens Næringsliv

“Jon Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more.”

The New York Times

“A masterful short novel.”

Terje Eidsvåg, Adresseavisen

Jon Fosse

Photo: Tom A. Kolstad

Jon Fosse is widely considered one of the world’s most important living writers. Born in 1959 in Strandebarm, a small village in the western part of Norway, he lives today in the Grotten, an honorary residence, as well as in Hainburg, Austria, and Frekhaug, Norway.

Fosse has received numerous prizes, both in Norway and internationally, and he is mentioned increasingly often as a likely contender for the Nobel Prize. He has currently finished a major seven-volume work of what he calls “slow prose”. Septology consists of three volumes: The Other Name: Septology I – II was published in 2019 to international praise and longlisted for the Booker International Prize. I Is Another: Septology III – V was published autumn 2020 and A New Name: Septology VI – VII in September 2021.