Karl Ove Knausgaard in conversation with Mona Simpson and Donald Antrim at the Hammer Museum.

SOME FAVORITE WRITERS | THE ALTERNATIVE USES OF REAL LIFE IN FICTION & MEMOIR

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages and was listed among the 2013 Books of the Year by The Wall Street Journal. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and four children.

Donald Antrim is the author of the memoir The Afterlife and the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches in the writing program at Columbia University.

Mona Simpson was born in Wisconsin and moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, A Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.