Reading List

Authors Like Karl Ove Knausgård

Q: What should I read after My Struggle?

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy for a Scandinavian life told without protection, Annie Ernaux’s The Years for a life written as the history of a generation, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for the long novel of memory that came first.

Q: Does Karl Ove Knausgård have a new book?

Yes. The School of Night, the fourth novel in the Morning Star series, was published in English in January 2026, translated by Martin Aitken. In Norway the series reached its sixth volume, Jeg var lenge død, in October 2025, and he has said a seventh will be the last.

Q: Which Knausgård book should I read first?

A Death in the Family, the first volume of My Struggle (2009), is the usual starting point and can be read on its own. For something shorter, try Autumn (2015), the first of the Seasons books.

Between 2009 and 2011 Karl Ove Knausgård published six autobiographical novels in Norway under the title Min kamp — My Struggle, the same words as the Norwegian title of Hitler’s book. Together they run to more than 3,500 pages and sold over 450,000 copies in a country of about five million people. The first volume ends with Knausgård and his brother cleaning their grandmother’s house in Kristiansand, where their father had drunk himself to death, and an uncle publicly objected to how the family was portrayed. Born in Oslo in 1968 and raised on the island of Tromøya and in Kristiansand, he gives a nappy change or a cigarette on a balcony the same attention as a death. The ten writers below share his wager that an ordinary life, written down closely and without protecting anyone, is worth a reader’s time.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Autofiction · Memoir · Scandinavian fiction · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Karl Ove Knausgård, start with Tove Ditlevsen, whose Copenhagen Trilogy (1967–71) tells a Danish childhood, marriage and addiction with the same candour. Annie Ernaux also writes her own life, but as the life of a class and a generation, and Rachel Cusk turned autofiction inside out by making her narrator nearly disappear. Further down: Proust, a Nobel laureate often described as his teacher, and a writer who refuses to be known at all.

10 authors like Karl Ove Knausgård

The first total recall

Marcel Proust

French · Swann’s Way (1913), In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927)

Proust (1871–1922) spent the last part of his life writing In Search of Lost Time, a novel in seven volumes narrated by a man whose life closely follows his author’s. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, and the last three appeared after his death. Its best-known scene has the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea bring back a whole childhood.

The comparison readers reach for first, and for good reason: both are very long novels about one man’s life, built from memory, in which the smallest sensation can open a whole period of the past. Proust is more ironic and more interested in society; Knausgård is blunter and closer to the bone.

— Lisanne

A Scandinavian life, unprotected

Tove Ditlevsen

Danish · Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), Dependency (1971)

Ditlevsen (1917–1976) grew up in a working-class district of Copenhagen and was a published poet as a young woman. Her three volumes of memoir, published together in English as The Copenhagen Trilogy, move from a childhood with a difficult mother to early literary fame, several marriages and an addiction to the opioids her doctor husband prescribed for her.

The Scandinavian precedent for writing family, marriage and addiction without disguise. Ditlevsen covers in three short books what Knausgård covers in six long ones, with the same refusal to make herself look better than she was. Start here if the length of My Struggle puts you off.

— Lisanne

Childhood as an indictment

Thomas Bernhard

Austrian · Gathering Evidence (1975–1982), Woodcutters (1984)

Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote five short autobiographical books, from An Indication of the Cause (1975) to A Child (1982), about a childhood in and around Salzburg and the lung disease that nearly killed him as a young man; in English they are collected as Gathering Evidence. His novels are unbroken paragraphs of furious monologue, and Woodcutters portrayed a real Viennese acquaintance so recognisably that he sued and the book was briefly confiscated.

Knausgård shares Bernhard’s long breath and his habit of writing real people so recognisably that they object. Bernhard is angrier and funnier, and his paragraphs never break, but both turn a life story into an argument with family, home town and country.

— Lisanne

Norway’s Nobel laureate

Jon Fosse

Norwegian · Melancholy (1995), Septology (2019–2021)

Fosse was born in Haugesund, on Norway’s west coast, in 1959 and is best known abroad as a playwright. Septology, a novel in seven parts written as one continuous sentence, is narrated by an ageing painter, Asle, who keeps meeting another version of himself. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Knausgård, who attended the Writing Academy in Hordaland, is often described as his former student.

The other pole of Norwegian prose. Where Knausgård adds detail, Fosse strips it away, repeating a few plain words until they sound like prayer; both are trying to reach what lies beneath an ordinary day. Read Septology after My Struggle to hear the same landscape in a very different voice.

— Lisanne

Fathers and sons, quietly

Per Petterson

Norwegian · Out Stealing Horses (2003), I Curse the River of Time (2008)

Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and published his first book in 1987. Out Stealing Horses, in which a man in his late sixties recalls the summer of 1948 he spent with his father near the Swedish border, won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2007. I Curse the River of Time, about a son and his dying mother, won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2009.

The same Norwegian material as Knausgård — a father who leaves, a son trying to understand him, rivers and forest — told with restraint instead of excess. Petterson works through fiction where Knausgård uses his own name, and his novels are short.

— Lisanne

The self as a social fact

Annie Ernaux

French · A Man’s Place (1983), The Years (2008)

Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery. She has written almost entirely about her own life — her father, her mother, an illegal abortion in 1963, a love affair — in short, flat books, and The Years tells it in the third person as the history of a generation. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022; her support for the boycott of Israel drew criticism at the time, including from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

The most useful contrast to Knausgård. Both write the self without disguise, but Ernaux strips out the inner monologue and treats her life as evidence of class and history, while Knausgård goes ever further inward. Read A Man’s Place beside A Death in the Family, the first volume of My Struggle: two books about a father.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Ernaux →

Autofiction turned inside out

Rachel Cusk

British-Canadian · A Life’s Work (2001), Outline (2014)

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1967 and grew up partly in Los Angeles before moving to England. Her memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, and her account of divorce, Aftermath (2012), drew hostile reactions for their candour. In Outline and its sequels Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), a writer called Faye travels and listens while other people tell her about their lives, and she herself barely appears.

Cusk starts from the same material as Knausgård — her own marriage, divorce and children — but in the Outline trilogy she makes the narrator nearly vanish while everyone else talks. It is the book to read to see what autofiction can do besides confess.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

A life sorted into sentences

Sheila Heti

Canadian · How Should a Person Be? (2010), Motherhood (2018), Alphabetical Diaries (2024)

Heti was born in Toronto in 1976. How Should a Person Be? is a novel built from her life and real conversations with friends; Motherhood follows a narrator close to Heti deciding whether to have a child. For Alphabetical Diaries she took about ten years of her own diaries, sorted every sentence alphabetically and spent years cutting them down. Pure Colour (2022) won the Governor General’s Award for fiction.

Heti asks Knausgård’s question — what happens if you put your actual life on the page — and then experiments with the form. Alphabetical Diaries is the opposite experiment to My Struggle: the same raw material of a life, with the story order taken out.

— Lisanne

The novelist as himself

Ben Lerner

American · Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), The Topeka School (2019)

Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979 and published poetry before fiction. His novels follow narrators very close to himself: a young American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, a Brooklyn writer who has just sold a novel, and a teenage debater in Kansas whose parents are psychologists. The Topeka School was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Lerner writes what Knausgård writes — a writer living a life very like his own — but in short, wry, self-aware books that keep asking whether an experience is real or already material for fiction. A good bridge for readers who like the idea of My Struggle but not the length.

— Lisanne

The author who stays hidden

Elena Ferrante

Italian · The Days of Abandonment (2002), My Brilliant Friend (2011)

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. The author has published under that name since Troubling Love (1992), gives interviews only in writing and has never confirmed who she is. Her four Neapolitan novels (2011–2014) follow the friendship of two girls from a poor Naples neighbourhood over some sixty years, in the voice of one of them, Elena Greco.

The writer who argues most directly with Knausgård’s method. Ferrante writes with the same intensity about family, class and the urge to write, and her narrator even shares her name, but she keeps the author out of view so that the books stand without a public life behind them. Reading her after My Struggle raises the question of what exposure adds, and what it costs.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elena Ferrante →

Where to start if you loved Karl Ove Knausgård

If you want the same candour in fewer pages, read Tove Ditlevsen.

The Copenhagen Trilogy: childhood, marriage and addiction in three short books.

If you loved A Death in the Family, read Annie Ernaux.

A Man’s Place is a short, exact book about her father and the class distance between them.

If you want more Norway, read Per Petterson or Jon Fosse.

Out Stealing Horses for restraint, Septology for prose that sounds like prayer.

If you want autofiction that questions itself, read Rachel Cusk.

Start with Outline, and notice how little the narrator says.

If you want to go back to Knausgård himself, read the Seasons books or The Morning Star.

The Seasons quartet (2015–2016) begins with Autumn; The Morning Star (2020) opens a series of novels whose fourth, The School of Night, came out in English in January 2026.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Karl Ove Knausgård

Who writes like Karl Ove Knausgård?

Tove Ditlevsen, Annie Ernaux and Thomas Bernhard all wrote their own lives with the same lack of disguise. Among living writers, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner write narrators who are close versions of themselves, and Jon Fosse and Per Petterson write the same Norway in a quieter voice.

What should I read after My Struggle?

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy for a Scandinavian life told without protection, Annie Ernaux’s The Years for a life written as the history of a generation, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for the long novel of memory that came first.

Is Knausgård like Proust?

In scale and method, yes: both wrote multi-volume novels from one man’s memory in which small sensations open up the past. Proust is more social and ironic, Knausgård plainer and more confessional.

Does Karl Ove Knausgård have a new book?

Yes. The School of Night, the fourth novel in the Morning Star series, was published in English in January 2026, translated by Martin Aitken. In Norway the series reached its sixth volume, Jeg var lenge død, in October 2025, and he has said a seventh will be the last.

Which Knausgård book should I read first?

A Death in the Family, the first volume of My Struggle (2009), is the usual starting point and can be read on its own. For something shorter, try Autumn (2015), the first of the Seasons books.

What is autofiction?

Fiction built from the author’s own life, often under the author’s own name, as in My Struggle. Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner are often grouped under the label.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Karl Ove Knausgård

10 authors like Karl Ove Knausgård

Marcel Proust

Tove Ditlevsen

Thomas Bernhard

Jon Fosse

Per Petterson

Annie Ernaux

Rachel Cusk

Sheila Heti

Ben Lerner

Elena Ferrante

Where to start if you loved Karl Ove Knausgård

Frequently asked questions about authors like Karl Ove Knausgård

Who writes like Karl Ove Knausgård?

What should I read after My Struggle?

Is Knausgård like Proust?

Does Karl Ove Knausgård have a new book?

Which Knausgård book should I read first?

What is autofiction?

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