Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard shot to international fame with the publication between 2009 and 2011 of his provocatively titled six-volume semi-autobiographical novel Min Kamp....

Born in 1968, Knausgaard grew up on the island of Tromøya in southern Norway and studied arts and literature at the University of Bergen. Before establishing himself as a writer he worked as a schoolteacher, in a psychiatric hospital and on an oil rig.

His first two novels, Out of the World (1998) and A Time for Everything (2004) won critical acclaim, but it was the publication of the first volume of Min Kamp that made him a bestseller and attracted comparisons to Ibsen and Proust. While the Norwegian originals are simply numbered Min Kamp 1 , Min Kamp 2 and so on, the English translations by Don Bartlett, which appeared from 2012 to 2018, are titled more evocatively as A Death in the Family , A Man in Love , Boyhood Island , Dancing in the Dark , Some Rain Must Fall and The End .

The novel sequence proved doubly controversial – not only did its Norwegian title resemble Hitler’s Mein Kampf , its thinly veiled depiction of Knausgarrd’s alcoholic father and other dysfunctional relatives angered his family. However, his haunting, incantatory prose and remorseless examination of family trauma won him millions of readers around the world.

Min Kamp was followed in 2015–16 by the Seasons Quartet , another autobiographical sequence made up of letters, diary fragments and other ‘found’ documents. Keenly interested in the visual arts, Knausgaard has also written on Edvard Munch and Anselm Kiefer. A book of essays, In the Land of the Cyclops , appeared in 2018.

A third novel sequence began with The Morning Star in 2020, followed in 2021 by The Wolves of Eternity . The remaining two books have yet to be translated into English.

Karl Ove Knausgaard has five children by three marriages, and lives in London with his third wife, Michal Shavit, his editor at Harvill Secker. ‘To have a nephew or a cousin who wrote about the family was cruel,’ he told the Guardian in 2023, ‘but on the other hand, I wrote about my father because I needed to. So, it’s impossible to solve…’