This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jon Fosse, has cancelled the press conference for the award ceremony on December 10.
Fosse wrote in an e-mail to the Norwegian newspaper VG that he had declined all programme items, participation in which is not obligatory for Nobel Prize winners in literature.
The Swedish Academy had informed him that he did not have to give a press conference because he had already done so many interviews.
The Nobel Foundation announced that all further interviews with Fosse had also been cancelled.
VG reported that press spokeswoman Rebecka Oxelström said that the only item on the programme that Fosse was obliged to complete as a Nobel Prize winner in Literature was his Nobel lecture, which he is due to give on December 7.
He can decide on everything else himself, she said. Fosse is also expected to talk to students about his work.
The 64-year-old wrote that his reduced programme in no way meant that he did not appreciate the Nobel Prize and pointed out that other writers had not even come to the award ceremony.
He said is already looking forward most to the moment when he has the award ceremony programme behind him. "Larger social gatherings give me no pleasure, on the contrary," he wrote.
The Swedish Academy awarded Fosse the world's most important literary prize at the beginning of October for his innovative theatre plays and prose.
The prize, which is endowed with 11 million kronor ($1,000,000), is traditionally awarded on the anniversary of the death of the prize's founder, Alfred Nobel (1833-96).
