All posts tagged: past winners

The Incantatory Power of Jon Fosse’s Work

The Incantatory Power of Jon Fosse’s Work

Jon Fosse’s English translator on the author’s evocation of peacefulness Ole Berg-Rusten / NTB / AFP / Getty October 5, 2023, 6:01 PM ET Jon Fosse, the Norwegian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023, was better known in the English-speaking world on announcement morning than many past winners have been. Last year saw the U.S. publication of the final volume of his Septology, which was shortlisted for several major awards and has attracted more and more readers by word of mouth. But Fosse has long been famous and beloved outside of England and America—in the rest of the world he is first and foremost a playwright. His plays have been translated into 50 languages and have been performed around the world; he is often called the most-produced playwright alive today. In this sense, he is the exact opposite of avant-garde or inaccessible—his work speaks to everyone. The first fiction by Fosse I read, more than 20 years ago, was a German translation of the novel Melancholy, and I found an American publisher …

Does Iowa Matter To Republican Candidates?

Does Iowa Matter To Republican Candidates?

The recent history of the Iowa Republican caucus offers the candidates chasing former President Donald Trump one big reason for optimism. But that history also presents them with an even larger reason for concern. In each of the past three contested GOP nomination fights, Iowa Republicans have rejected the candidate considered the national front-runner in the race, as Trump is now. Instead, in each of those three past caucuses, Iowa Republicans delivered victory to an alternative who relied primarily on support from the state’s powerful bloc of evangelical Christian conservatives. Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams But each of those three recent Iowa winners failed to capture the Republican presidential nomination or, in the end, even to come very close. All three of them were eventually defeated, handily, by the front-runner that they beat in Iowa. That pattern played out in 2008 when Mike Huckabee won Iowa but then lost the nomination to John McCain, in 2012 when Rick Santorum won Iowa but lost the nomination to Mitt Romney, and in …