Jon Fosse - Selected Title Author

What inspired you to write this book?

In a way, inspiration is an unfamiliar concept to me. I can’t say that anything inspires me to write anything at all. I sit down and start writing, and if it’s a good start – which it often is – then it more or less contains the rest of what I go on to write.

Once a few pages are written, then I listen, as it were, to what’s been written, and then to something else, something I cannot name. At some point during the writing process, I get the feeling that what I’ve been doing has already been written somewhere out there, not within me, but out there somewhere. And when I write my best, it doesn’t feel like I’m the one writing, but like something is writing within me. What I write writes itself, as it were. So if I must answer the question, I suppose the answer would be that writing itself inspires me.

Who is this book for?

I never think about writing for anyone. If I did, I don’t think I would ever dare to write. I concentrate fully on the act of writing itself. Whether what I write will be published or read by anyone doesn’t concern me.

A long time ago, I was also asked who I write for – then, I said that I write for God. That might not be as foolish as it sounds. I don’t imagine myself addressing another person, yet the writing is still a kind of address, and thereby an address to no one, to nothing, and thus, in a sense, to God. In this way, writing reminds me of praying; writing is a prayer. I’m not the first to think this – Franz Kafka said that for him, writing is prayer.

But I know that what I write, if someone wants to publish it, will become a book, a product that will be sold to someone. To whom? All I can say is that it is to whom it may concern.

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See full presentation of the book here

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See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2025 here