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Karl Ove Knausgaard is an award-winning Norwegian author whose autobiographical novel cycle, My Struggle, spans six volumes which have been translated into over fifteen languages. His lecture was given at the 2017 Windham-Campbell prize ceremony.

“For any writer seeking reassurance of the virtue of rewriting, his description of ‘eight hundred pages of beginnings’ is a kind of balm. But he demands that writers never shy away from big questions: ‘What is the meaning of life? Where does this meaning come from? Who am I?’ A light-footed meditation on the literary life.”—Kirkus Reviews“[Knausgaard] begins by recounting formative literary experiences: bringing home book-filled shopping bags from the local library, and the day his mother gave him Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, a key moment in establishing literature as ‘a hiding place for me, and at the same time a place where I became visible.’ . . . Aspiring writers will find comfort in Knausgaard’s candor, which allows him to frankly reveal the feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence with which he has struggled.”—Publishers Weekly