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Interviews with well-known authors from Britain and around the world, looking at what drives their work and concentrating on their literary life story.

Talking Books: Karl Ove Knausgaard

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Karl Ove Knausgaard

BBC World Service - Talking Books, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard and what motivated him to expose intimate details of his life

Karl Ove Knausgaard and what motivated him to expose the most intimate details of his life on paper.

The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is among the surprise literary successes in recent years. Aged only 45 he has been compared to March Proust having written 3,600 pages, six volumes, on his life. He contends this work isn’t a memoir but fiction. It’s called My Struggle, Min Kamp in Norwegian, and Mein Kampf in German. It’s full of the everyday banalities of life, existential crises, and a serious exposition on Adolf Hitler, the nature of good and evil, and death.  Razia Iqbal interviews him in front of an audience at the Hay Festival and asks what motivated him to expose the most intimate details of his life on paper.

(Karl Ove Knausgaard)
(Credit: Thomas Wagstrom)

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