Karl Ove Knausgård

Debut and follow-up

Knausgård made his publishing debut in 1998 with the novel Out of the World, for which he was awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. This was the first time in the award's history that a debut novel had won.^[7]

His second novel, A Time for Everything (2004), partly retells certain parts of the Bible as well as the history of angels on earth. The book won a number of awards and was nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize. It was also nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. It was called a "strange, uneven, and marvellous book" by The New York Review of Books.^[8]

The Min Kamp books

While Knausgård's two first books were well received, it was the six-volume Min Kamp (My Struggle) series of autobiographical novels that made Knausgård a household name in Norway. Published from 2009 to 2011 and totalling over 3,500 pages, the books were hugely successful and also caused much controversy.^[7][9] The controversy was caused partly because the Norwegian title of the book, Min Kamp, is the same as the Norwegian title of Hitler's Mein Kampf, and partly because some have suggested Knausgård goes too far in exposing the private lives of his friends and family—including his father, ex-wife, uncle, and grandmother. The books have nevertheless received almost universally favourable reviews, at least the first two volumes. In a country of five million people, the Min Kamp series has sold over 450,000 copies.^[10]

The Min Kamp series is translated into numerous languages. The books were published to great critical acclaim in Denmark,^[11] Sweden,^[10] and several other countries. All six have been translated into English by Don Bartlett for publication by Archipelago Books (US) and Harvill Secker (UK), and have been retitled in Britain as A Death in the Family, A Man in Love, Boyhood Island, Dancing in the Dark, Some Rain Must Fall, and The End (The End translated by Bartlett and Martin Aitken). The audiobooks of the English translations were recorded by Edoardo Ballerini.^[12]

In a long and largely positive review of the first Min Kamp books, James Wood of The New Yorker wrote that "There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgård's book: even when I was bored, I was interested."^[13]

Essays and the Seasons Quartet 2013–2019

Knausgård served as a consultant to the new Norwegian translation of the Bible.^[14] In 2013, he published a collection of essays, Sjelens Amerika: tekster 1996–2013 ("The Soul's [or Mind's] America: Writings 1996–2013"), and in 2013 he adapted his novel Out of the World into a screenplay.^[15]

Between 2015 and 2016, Knausgård published his Seasons Quartet, a series of four books titled Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, that like the My Struggle-series are also autobiographical in nature, consisting of diary excerpts, letters, and other personal materials.

Knausgård has written works devoted to the visual arts. He co-authored Anselm Kiefer: Transition from Cool to Warm, a book in 2018 on the German artist Anselm Kiefer with James Lawrence.^[16] In 2019, Knausgård published a monograph on the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, and his interview about Munch also appeared as a highlight of the British Museum's 2019 exhibition catalogue, Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, by curator Giulia Bartrum.^[17]

In October 2019 Knausgård became the sixth writer chosen to contribute to the Future Library project.^[18] His essay collection In the Land of the Cyclops was published in Norwegian in 2018 and in English in January 2021.^[19]

Novel series 2020–2025

In September 2020 Knausgård's novel Morgenstjernen ("The Morning Star"), a story about a number of peoples' everyday life in southern Norway while a mysteriously bright star appears in the sky, was published to critical acclaim in Norway.^[20] Danish and Swedish translations were published a few months later to great critical acclaim.^[21][22] It was sold in advance to fifteen countries.^[21] In 2021, the novel was listed by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year.^[23]

In 2021, Ulvene fra evighetens skog (English translation The Wolves of Eternity, 2023), a sequel to Morgenstjernen mainly set in the 1980s that portrays two estranged half-siblings in Norway and the Soviet Union, was published in Norway.^[24] The longest novel in the series and dealing with various philosophical questions, it prompted critical comparison to a 19th-century Russian novel.^[25] A third book in the series titled Det tredje riket (English translation The Third Realm, 2024) was published in 2022,^[26][27] followed by Nattskolen (English translation The School of Night, 2026), in 2023^[28][29] and Arendal in 2024.^[30] The sixth novel Jeg var lenge død, that outright deals with the supernatural implied in the previous novels, was published in Norwegian on 31 October 2025.^[31][32] In a radio interview published the same day, Knausgård revealed that he is writing a seventh book,^[33] which will be the final book in the series.^[31]

Nominations

• Nominated for the 2004 Nordic Council's Literature Prize

Awards

• 1998 Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature
• 2009 Brage Prize
• 2009 NRK P2 Listeners' Prize
• 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet
• 2015 Premio Malaparte
• 2015 Welt-Literaturpreis^[53]
• 2017 Jerusalem Prize^[54]
• 2019 Swedish Academy Nordic Prize^[55]
• 2023 Lenin Award^[56]
• See full list of Awards and honours of My Struggle