Closed Guitar

Jon Fosse The Nobel Prize

Original title: Stengd gitar
Publisher: Det norske Samlaget, 1985
Genre: Novel
Pages: 176 pages

Liv is 20 years old and lives in a two-room apartment with her one-year-old son. She steps outside for a moment to take out the trash and the door slams shut behind her – and her baby is left alone in the locked apartment. The young mother is helpless, confused, and unable to solve the problem of the closed door. Thoughts of her child – the baby screaming, sleeping, alone in his crib— whirl through her mind, and during these nightmarish events, we also see the story of her past unfold.

Closed Guitar is Jon Fosse’s second novel, first published in 1985 and later adapted for the theatre. It is widely considered one of his best early works.

Foreign rights

Danish: Batzer
Vietnamese: Thời Độ

Jon Fosse is one of the few writers who is trying, with sheer talent and luck, to do something more with the form of the novel. Closed Guitar is not first and foremost a story, but a depiction; it reproduces a situation rather than simply narrating it.

Bergens Tidende

Jon Fosse

Photo: Agnete Brun

Nobel Prize-winner Jon Fosse (b. 1959), is widely considered one of the most important writers of our time. For almost forty years, he has written novels, plays, poems, stories, essays, and children’s books. His award-winning work has been translated into more than fifty languages and his plays have been staged over a thousand times all over the world.

Jon Fosse grew up in Strandebarm, a small village in the western part of Norway, he now lives in the Grotten, an honorary residence in Oslo, as well as in Hainburg, Austria, and Frekhaug, Norway.

Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023 and has received numerous prizes, both in Norway and internationally through the years.