Someone Is Going to Come

Jon Fosse

Original title: Nokon kjem til å kome
Publisher: Samlaget, 1996
Genre: Play

In Someone is Going to Come the two of them want to be together, just the two of them, so they leave the city and buy a remote house by the sea. But is it possible to do what they want to do? In their desire to be alone together they near flee the world of people but are followed by the anxiety that someone is going to come and disturb them. Won’t somebody come? Surely someone will come.

Someone is Going to Come is Fosse first play. Written in 1996, with the world premiere held at The Norwegian Theatre and soon came to signify a new era within the contemporary theatre.

Foreign rights

French, German, Portuguese, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian.

Awards

Among others:
2007 Deutsche Jugendbuch Preis.
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

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.