Karl Ove Knausgård

The Wall Street Journal has described him as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations".

Karl Ove Knausgård (born 6 December 1968) is a Norwegian author.

He became known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp).

He eventually moved to Stockholm and published his first novel in 1998.

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.

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 marvelous book" by The New York Review of Books.

While Knausgård's two first books were well received, it was the six-volume Min Kamp series of autobiographical novels that made Knausgård a household name in Norway.

He has won the 2009 Brage Prize, 2017 Jerusalem Prize, and 2019 Swedish Academy Nordic Prize.

Born in Oslo, Knausgård was raised on Tromøya in Arendal and in Kristiansand, and studied arts and literature at the University of Bergen.

He then held various jobs, including teaching high school in northern Norway, selling cassettes, working in a psychiatric hospital and on an oil platform, while trying to become a writer.

Published from 2009 to 2011 and totalling over 3,500 pages, the books were hugely successful and also caused much controversy.

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.

The Min Kamp series is translated into numerous languages.

The books were published to great critical acclaim in Denmark, Sweden, 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.

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."

Knausgård served as a consultant to the new Norwegian translation of the Bible.

Since the completion of the My Struggle series in 2011, he has also published an autobiographical series entitled The Seasons Quartet, as well as critical work on the art of Edvard Munch.

In 2013, he published a collection of essays, Sjelens Amerika: tekster 1996–2013 (""), and as of September 2013 he is adapting his novel Out of the World into a screenplay.

Between 2015 and 2016, Knausgaard published his Seasons Quartet, a series of four books entitled Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer.

These books are also autobiographical in nature, consisting of diary excerpts, letters, and other personal materials.

These books were released in English between 2017 and 2018.

Knausgaard has also 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.

Knausgård's essay collection, In the Land of the Cyclops (2018), was first published in English in January 2021.

In 2019, Knausgaard 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.

In October 2019 Knausgård became the sixth writer chosen to contribute to the Future Library project.

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.

Danish and Swedish translations were published a few months later to great critical acclaim.

It was sold in advance to fifteen countries.

In 2021 Ulvene fra evighetens skog, a sequel to Morgenstjernen mainly set in Norway and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, was published in Norway.

The English translation The Wolves of Eternity was published in September 2023.

A third book in the series with the title Det tredje riket followed in 2022.