Jon Fosse meets me in the foyer of my Oslo hotel. He takes me by the elbow over to the front desk where, stencilled on the wall, there's a small paragraph of text. "Part of a novel of mine," says Fosse, who then lowers his voice to a hiss. "Upstairs, there is a whole Jon Fosse room." I can't tell if he's thrilled or mortified.

It isn't every playwright who gets a hotel suite named after them, particularly when they're still breathing. But Fosse is no ordinary playwright. One of Norway's most famous writers, he is also perhaps Europe's most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won the biggest prize in global theatre, the £275,000 Ibsen award, three years after being awarded France's Ordre National du Mérite; last October, before the Nobel prize for literature was awarded, there was a flurry of excitement when it looked like 2013 might be Fosse's year (it turned out to be Alice Munro's instead).

In the circumstances, I say as we sit down in a nearby cafe, having your own hotel suite seems only right. Apologetically, he explains that he's never used it: he has an official residence nearby, courtesy of Norway's royal family. "It's part of the palace. To be absolutely honest, I didn't really want it. But they convinced me." He shrugs, cheerfully perplexed.

One country, however, has remained stubbornly immune to Fosse's talents: the UK. The last major production of his work – a version of his play I Am the Wind by the legendary French director Patrice Chéreau at London's Young Vic in 2011 – met with polite but muted reviews. Nine years before, Katie Mitchell's staging of Nightsongs at the Royal Court was such a flop that even Mitchell has admitted it was a failure.

British critics have generally been puzzled by what confronts them in his work. Even fans find themselves baffled: the Independent's reviewer, despite admitting that I Am the Wind contained some of the greatest theatre he had ever seen, wrote: "I wonder if I understand Jon Fosse's play."

'Pinter said his plays weren’t about lack of communication, but about too much communication. I would say the same' … Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind at the Young Vic in London in 2011. Photograph: Simon Annand

When we talk about the upcoming UK premiere of 2005's The Dead Dogs, a comfortless tale of a young man marooned inside his mother's flat, Fosse claims not to care what the critics will say, or if his plays – now fully translated into English – will ever find a home on British stages. "I think there's a fear of what is different," he says. "It makes your theatre unique, but sometimes in a stupid way, like your attitude to the World Cup. You're still the champions even if Germany wins, because you invented football."

Anyway, perhaps comprehension isn't really the point. Spare and unyielding, his scripts – more than 30 in all, not to mention a sizeable stack of adaptations, novels and essays – circle obsessively around the perplexities of meaning. His first play, 1995's Someone Is Going to Come, centres on a couple who have just moved into a dilapidated house: she is crippled by the fear that they're not alone, he by jealousy. Their conversation is fractious – intimate, but never quite connecting.

Those traits also shape a later trilogy, themed around summer, autumn and winter: in the first, a woman pieces together the day her husband disappeared at sea; in the second, two strangers meet in a graveyard, yet have somehow known each other for a lifetime. The third, concerning a prostitute and a businessman, is a complex fugue of mistaken desire and cross purposes, rendered in language of numb precision: "It's not like that," she says when he suggests they leave together. "It's all like that," he replies.

With its heavy silences and splintered dialogue, his work has reminded some of Beckett, others of Pinter. Fosse concedes there are similarities: "Pinter said his plays weren't about lack of communication, but about too much communication. I would say the same: my people communicate without words. They already know what's going to be said."

Perhaps inevitably for a country not overburdened with globally famous dramatists, his name has also been yoked to the biggest Norwegian of the lot, Ibsen. He shrugs. "When I started to be produced abroad, they all started saying that. My standard answer is that it's unfair to Ibsen – and also to me."

Now 54, Fosse was born on a remote farm near Haugesund on Norway's west coast, near the mouth of the mighty Hardanger fjord. Though he now divides his time between Austria and Oslo, he still keeps a cottage in the area and, though his settings are abstract, the savage grandeur of the landscape (its fishing cottages and isolated villages, the lure of a dangerous sea) seeps into his work. Is it autobiographical? "Of course, but it is – how to say it – double, both ways. I couldn't write a play like I Am the Wind without knowing anything about the sea. But the universe of the play is created from zero. I prefer not to know anything before I start. I usually compare writing to listening: I don't know exactly what I'm listening for, but I try to listen anyway."

Valerie Gogan and director Simon Usher in rehearsals for The Dead Dogs by Jon Fosse at the Print Room in London. Photograph: Nobby Clark

Fosse only turned to theatre in his mid-30s, after making his name as a novelist. If his plays sometimes seem unsure whether they're drama or something more expressly poetic, this may simply be a reflection of his attitude to theatre in general. He once said collaborations were like "group sex". What did he mean? He laughs. "That was more about the writing process. I need freedom and solitude for my writing. When I started to write for theatre, I wondered how to control it and decided I couldn't. I had to let it go." He smiles. "But theatre at its best has something sacred to it. It's more like a sacrament than group sex. At least the kind of theatre I like."

Fosse has the air of a man who has faced his share of demons. I wonder if that could explain much of the desolation in his plays. He fiddles with his coffee cup. "Writing has been a way of surviving," he says eventually. "I started writing very young, when I was 12 – small poems, little stories. I created my own space in the world, a place where I felt safe. It's a kind of escape." One demon has recently been exorcised: the drinking, which ended abruptly two years ago, after Fosse was hospitalised with alcohol poisoning. Since then he hasn't touched a drop. His mouth splinters into a smile. "It was a long marriage, I would say. But it's completely over."

He has recently remarried, for the third time; after three decades of furious work, he wants to write less, and more slowly. There were whispers he'd give up the theatre altogether, barring the odd translation (his version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is about to open in Oslo). Are the rumours true? "Oh yes," he says. "I already have." Really? No new plays at all? He shrugs. "The idea of writing another play doesn't give me pleasure any more." His fingers draw a curve in the air. "Twenty years, 1994 to 2014, about 40 plays including adaptations. I like the shape."

I wonder how he would cope with the glare of the Nobel, should he get it. He sighs. "Last year, it was in papers all over the world – just because of Ladbrokes. My name suddenly started to move up the list. It's meant to be completely secret." But surely he'd like to win? "Of course," he says, though he looks far from persuaded. "But the simple truth is that I was very pleased when the news came that it wasn't me. Normally, they give it to very old writers, and there's a wisdom to that – you receive it when it won't affect your writing."

We head to a nearby roof terrace to take photographs. The wind is skirling around us, the sky the colour of pumice. There is sleet in the air. The photographer wants Fosse to stand on a table, to get a clear shot of the city behind. He glances down at the drop, plainly terrified by the idea. I back under the canopy, leaving him wavering on the brink.

Four more artists the world has heard of – but the UK hasn't



Hans Teeuwen, comedian, Holland

An Edinburgh fringe institution, this Dutch standup is a master of the absurd and the ultimate "comedian's comedian". Even below par, as reviewed by Brian Logan in 2010, he peddles some of the "furthest-out and funniest idiocy in town". You laugh at Teeuwen without knowing why, says Logan, and just as you have begun to work it out, he's doing something entirely unexpected. The Dutchman has been off the circuit for a while, but having recently become a father, he should have lots of material to mine when he does decide to come back.

Ina Müller, singer and presenter, Germany

Born of farming stock in Lower Saxony, Ina Müller started out as a pharmacist's assistant before founding her long-running cabaret act, Queen Bee, with the standup Edda Schnittgard. Müller became a champion of Low German language and culture through her many appearances on stage, screen and radio. Now a household name in Germany, she hosts her own multi-awardwinning late-night chat and music show, Inas Nacht, as well as presenting the German scores on Eurovision night. In tribute to Amy Winehouse's death, Müller sang Valerie with Winehouse's goddaughter at the 2012 Echos, Germany's Brits.

Tomás Saraceno, artist, Argentina

Visionary artist-turned-architect Saraceno has his head in the clouds, quite literally: he is best known for building lofty biospheres that bring a sense of play and wonder to the art world. British audiences did get to explore his huge inflatable dome, Airport City, as part of the Hayward Gallery's Psycho Buildings in 2008. But his more recent creations have been further afield. 2012's Cloud City, a constellation of huge interconnected modules, took over the roof of the Met museum in New York, and last year's In Orbit invited gallery visitors to crawl across great nets cast across the ceiling of the K21 Ständehaus in Düsseldorf.

Chaya Czernowin, composer, Israel

Israeli-born but US based, composer Chaya Czernowin is a woman much in demand, whose music has been performed at more than 40 festivals around the world. Currently Walter Bigelow professor of music at Harvard University, Czernowin was commissioned by Daniel Barenboim to write for his West-Eastern Divan orchestra at the 2013 Lucerne festival. As Czernowin says of the resulting piece, At the Fringe of Our Gaze: "Sometimes that which is tucked away at the very edge of our attention is the very thing which ends up having the strongest effect on the shape of things to come." Nancy Groves