Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer whose six-volume autobiographical novel, Min kamp (2009–11; My Struggle, 2012–18), proved to be a runaway best seller in Norway and also captivated a large and growing number of English-language readers. Some considered him the greatest Norwegian writer since playwright Henrik Ibsen. His deliberately prolix and minutely detailed style drew comparison to that of French novelist Marcel Proust in the seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu.
Knausgaard was the second child of an English teacher and a nurse, and he grew up on the island of Tromøy and in Kristiansand, both in southern Norway. When he was a teenager, his parents divorced, and his father, an alcoholic, moved in with his own mother and ultimately drank himself to death. His father was, as Knausgaard revealed in the first volume of his autobiography, a brutal and demanding man who humiliated and belittled his son, and their relationship essentially formed the author’s sense of himself. Knausgaard graduated from the University of Bergen.
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