Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most important contemporary writers, since his 1983 fiction debut he has published prose, poetry and over forty plays. Fosse has been awarded a lifetime stipend by the Norwegian government among countless other accolades, and is one of the most performed living playwrights today. He was the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator of German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. His translations include work by Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf; his translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction.

"Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own." --Nordic Council Literary Prize

"The Beckett of the twenty-first century." --Le Monde

"He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue.... What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have - anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death - such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn't matter if it is drama, poetry or prose - it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness." --Anders Olsson, Nobel committee