Karl Ove Knausgård's acceptence speech after  

receiving The Swedish Academy's Nordic prize, 2019. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
It is a great honor to have received the Swedish Academy's Nordic prize. And it's tempting to 
take all the credit, to tell myself that I certainly deserve this, with all the hard work I've put in, 
but it would nearly be dishonest, almost a kind of theft - because writing is to be part of a 
collective, I was about to say, ​whether you want to or not​.  
 
This collective might be vague and hard to grasp, and we are often blind to it, not even getting a 
glimps of it, hiding behind our great selves. But that doesn't make it less real, just harder to talk 
about.  
 
But now I’m going to give it a try!  
 
Because it's here, in the abdication of the self, where the heart of literature exists.  
 
Literature is not about clinging onto an identity or an idea, it's about the contrary: about letting 
go and fall.  
 
For as long as I have been writing, I've been interested in the space between the me and the us, 
between the inividual and the social. See, just by writing a sentence, that's where you move. 
Because the language is not yours, it's ours, it stands there waiting for us when we are born, and 
it stays in the world when we have left, ready to be conquered by those who’ll succeed us.  
 
The language have been forwarded by generations to generations, so far back that there is no 
history therefrom; the oldest words such as m ​ other,​ ​bread,​ ​blood​, w
​ ater,​ goes back thousands of 
years.  
 
It is remarkable that both the age and the distance completely disappear when a child enters the 
language and says t​ ree​, ​grass​, says r​ unning fast​. Here, the language is very close, so close that the 
child soon uses it to think about itself and its deepest secrets. The language becomes the child, or 
the child becomes the language. And by virtue of this, of growing into the language and 
becoming, the child also grows into the community.  
 
I remember once when my daughter, during a winter night stood by the window upstairs, 
pointed towards the starlit sky and said: "The moon shines." She was two years old and my eyes 
filled with tears, because suddenly I realized that she existed in the world, just like all humans in 
all times have existed in the world, looked up at the moon, and said its name.  
 
Four times I have witnessed children growing into the language. First the words - m ​ other​, ​sun​, 
sap​ - then the sentences - l​ ook the cat is eating​ - and then suddenly they're sitting there, having 
long conversations about things that I don’t even know about. The language has gone from 
being a word here and there, to become a stream, a torrent, a flood of words and concepts and 
notions. And everything comes from outside - not a single word, not a single concept, not a 
single notion is their own. Yet, they are themselves, there's no doubt about it, their selves are 
always shining bright.  
 
I am me, you are me, we are me.  
 
The language also comes with the stories. Seeping in from every direction, from the smaller 
moments, like the wasp that just drowned in the glass of juice standing on the red table in the 
garden, or the bird that autumn day, which sat down on the thin, smooth branch, bent forward 
with an open beak and nibbled the gleaming rowan berries, till the greater pictures, like how 
mom and dad met, or how my big brother fell of his bike in high speed and hit a hole in his 
head. The ambulance that came, mom's fright which blurred out her whole persona, suddenly 
making her become someone else.  
 
Then comes the stories, about the country you live in, about other countries and continents, and 
about the history, which opens up and continues to open up during your whole life, as if the past 
too was inexhaustible, and not only the future.  
 
And with the stories comes the literature.  
 
The literature is actually a kind of border town, where the outside is brought into the inside, and 
the inside is brought into the outside. The work being executed there is radical, but it's such an 
incorporated part of our culture that no one ever think of it as such. What is radical is not the 
exchange between the outside and the inside, since that is a constant process in all of us, when 
the world out there becomes visible in the darkness of the brain, sharp and clear and filled with 
colors.  
 
No, what is radical about it, is that we always use the literature to search for ​the strange​ and ​the 
unfamiliar​, that which we don't own or know ourselves. If we meet ​the strange​ outside of the 
literature, let's say in the form of an unknown person who sits down by the cafe table, and starts 
talking about this and that about his life, we feel a slight discomfort.  
 
Had it been a friend who entrusted us, we would have listened, thought, engaged, pershaps 
giving an advice. Thus, it's not the private itself which is unbearable, but the strange and 
unfamiliar private. That which makes us think: this is not our business. We don't want to know 
anything of this.  
 
The strange and unfamiliar private,​ that could be a definition of literature itself. Because when we 
sit down and open a novel or a collection of poems, that's exactly what we are after: the thoughts 
of strangers, the problems of strangers, the life of strangers.  
 
And that is not only true for novels and poems, it concerns all literature: When we take down a 
book by H ​ eidegger​ from the shelf, it's not beause we want to read a philisopher who already 
thought like all the other philosophers, that would be pointless - no, we read Heidegger to see 
what Heidegger has thought about, assured that those thoughts are no where else to be found. 
And that is quite strange, isn't it? 
 
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to seek what everyone is thinking, meaning it's obviously valid 
for all of us? Why seek the thoughts of a single person? And doesn't that contradict what I 
initually said, that writing is being part of a collective?  
 
Literature is by nature always on the outer edge, in the place where the exchange is happening, 
the transition,​ where one becomes the other. But it's really happening inside of us, the exchange 
is taking place in our outer edge, we are that border town. The whole point with literature and 
art is that it’s establishing a place in the center of the world; a place in the center of our us, 
where we can see the world and ourselves from the outside - which really means to see the 
world and ourselves. Because isn't it true: what we can't see doesn't exist - and that also goes for 
the things we don't see in ourselves?  
 
In her essay "​The Condition of Secrecy​", the Danish author ​Inger Christensen​ cites ​Elias 
Canetti​s' book "​Earwitness​". Canetti recounts going to see the same Rembrandt painting every 
day during a period of his life. The painting is called "​The Blinding of Samson​" and depics two 
soldiers sticking out S​ amson​'s eyes, on behalf of D​ elila​ who is standing in the background, 
smiling.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Blinding of Samson (1636) by Rembrandt. 
 
 
Canetti wrote that the painting tought him about hatred. "But there is still no knowledge about 
what you've experienced, it must first appear before your sight, with others, for you to 
understand it", he wrote. Only then will it be real. Before that, it may be as if it didn't exist. As if 
understanding and becoming is the same thing for the self. 
 
The first time I experienced this must have been when I was eleven years old and read a book by 
Ursula K. Le Guin​, called "​A Wizard of Eartsea​". From all the books that I had read so far, I had 
moved out, away from myself. I read about something which happened ​out there​, it had nothing 
to do with me, but I was there, that was the whole point, and that along the way, I became 
possessed with all the feelings of the whole-world.  
 
"A Wizard of Eartsea" was different. It's a childrens' book, which makes it a bit strange to talk 
about it in a context like this, but believe me when I say that the simple story plumbs deeply, in a 
similar way as the fairy tales do; around the naive and childish, there is in general a darkness, 
and in that darkness something is glimmering, something which always have been true.  
 
So if you excuse me for a moment and let me become my eleven year old me again: we are now 
located in a world of islands and oceans, it’s pre-industrial and manual, people are sailing or 
walking, just like they did in the old times.  
 
 
 
Everything in this world, all the things and all the creatures, have their own names, like outside 
the everyday language, and if you know that name you master that thing or creature. This 
connection between w ​ ord​ and t​ hing​ was deeply fascinating, I remember, because it seemed to me 
to be true, in one way or anoher, as if this is what it's really like.  
 
It wasn't until many years later that I read ​Northrop Frye​ and his book about the Bible, "​The 
Great Code​", where he writes about the language in a culture's first, mythical phase - like t​ he old 
Testament​ and "​The Odysee​" and "​The Illiad​" all belong to, where the predication of one word 
can awake the power of that word in reality, and where the person who knows the name of a 
god can gain power over that same god.   
 
There is something oddly appealing with the idea that there is a real connection between the 
word and the thing which the word represents, that the word possesses some of the properties 
or powers of that object. And in a way, there is some truth to it. Because even if we know that 
also the oldest words are abstract and included in a closed system, they still hold reality open, by 
establishing a distance between the things, and thus letting them become visible in their own 
right. Because if something isn't termed or named, it doesn not exist.  
 
It’s the language that allows the world to become visible, through the distance it establishes. In 
other words, the insight comes with a price, which is ​distinction​. Beings that has no language, but 
thinks, must be captured by the things around them, tied to their function, just like the 
philosopher Heidegger claimed.  
 
Not even the lark sees the open​, he wrote, and probably meant that the animals don't know 
anything else but these stations and their relationship to them. Everything else is veiled in 
darkness.  
 
That is the darkness which the words light up, and thereby there's a connection between the 
language and the reality, such it was imagined by the old ones. But the connection easily gets 
automatic, and then the thing disappears in its name, and we can't see it. That is also why we 
have literature, and not only language, because the literature always seek new ways, from t​ he 
world of the language​ into​ the world of reality​. If you've lived in a landscape for many years and 
drive the same roads through it everyday, it's as if both the landscape and yourself abrase, we 
become a sort of unit.  
 
That's how I lived in Österlen where I lived for many years. I had seen everything so many times 
that the actual ​seeing​ wasn't an active action anymore, but a passive one: what I saw 
corresponded with what I knew. The world became c​ onfirmed​.  
 
 
 
But if I took another road, for example one of the many bridle roads which traversed the 
landscape, I suddenly saw it from another angle, and the elongated plain of rolling grain, 
interconnected by islands of houses and shady leafy trees, under a light blue sky, along a dark 
blue sea, came forth, and a wave of joy rinsed through me: I​ was here now​.  
 
The literature can give a similar access to the world, and thereby also access to ourselves, just 
because it is ​strange,​ just because the person who has written it might have charged the words in 
different, and perhaps new ways. Ways we wouldn't think about ourselves.  
 
In Ursula K. Le Guin's world of islands, those with knowledge of the real name of things, are 
wizards. The book is about one of them, the boy Ged, he's fiercly ambitious and at the same time 
he feels inferior, and when he brags about his abilities to another student at the school of 
wizards - and here I must add that the book was written in the 60's - it causes him to stretch 
them beyond his resources, he crosses the border of the kingdom of death.  
 
When he later returns, a creature is following him, a kind of demon, which thereby exists in the 
world. He escapes it, it follows, always coming closer, he tries to find its true name in order to 
control it, and the book ends when the creature attacks him, and he finally understands that the 
creature is carrying his own name.  
 
No wonder I was absorbed by these books as an eleven, twelve year old. I didn't know that I so 
badly wanted to be seen, I didn't even know such a need existed, and I didn't know that an action 
could be brought to life outside oneself, to settle down out there, and later haunt you. Nothing 
of this was consciously formulated inside of me, but through the tremendous identification with 
the main character, the emotions came streaming out in new places, in that way it was defined 
and retained: ever since, they were inside of me.  
 
Yes, what I've read has traced me from inside, my own experiences and my own longing sounds 
through a cacophony of others. I could stand here all evening and all night and talk about the 
books that have helped shape me, and not least the books that have shaped my own writing, but 
I'll settle for a few, and since we're here, where we are, I let them be Swedish.  
 
The first one I want to mention is U ​ lf Lundell​ who I read intensively in my teen age years, and 
who my first attempts at writing were hugely influenced by. First of all, the desire for freedom 
and the American romance that came with it, but also, and perhaps the most important, the 
simplicity in the language and the strong presence of reality.  
 
The second person I want to mention is ​Tomas Tranströmer​ and his book "​Baltics​". It was the 
first collection of poetry I felt an exhange with. The others seemed as if written in code, I knew 
the words but didn't understand their meaning.  
 
The key to "Baltics" was the landscape. I grew up on an island, and everything Tranströmer 
wrote about the coastal landscape, how the sea whispers in the trees, the old whitewashed 
churches shining in the barren land, it all made my own world visible to me, in a new and 
different way.  
 
Tranströmer wrote about the trails of history and about the passing of time, it made the 
landscape bigger, it made it universal, and it didn't just give me an insight into the greatness of 
the local, but it also gave me the courage to write about the same landscape, which had become 
worthy literature through Tranströmers writing. And he also wrote this:  
 
"And that feeling of 'right here we are' which needs to be retained, like when you carry a brimful 
vessel and nothing must be spilled." 
 
I was 25 years old and had just read the Norwegian writer ​Tor Ulven​, who always saw the 
moment from the perspective of eternity, in everything he wrote, and who was preoccupied by 
the transience and how everything disappeared in it, in a world which events fell out of, how the 
loss repealed the distance, between the events in the roman empire and the light from a 
wobbling bicycle in a suburb of Oslo, both just as fatally far from the present moment.  
 
I had read the french author ​Francis Ponge​ and his texts, where it seemed like the things 
themselves were heard and listened to, it was a revelation. And I had read the danish author 
Inger Christensen, who just like Ulven and Ponge was more preoccupied with the things, than 
the interpersonal relations, but who light them up from inside and gave them the same time as 
the reader, something which at least in my mind created a strong existensial sense of presence.  
 
It was Inger Christensen who wrote about the world's ​legibility​, how we sooner or later 
encounter t​ he illegible​, the border to the unintelligible, which in reality is inside of us, and the 
conversation between the legible and the illegible, which science files under names such as ​chaos 
theory​, ​fractals​, s​ uper strings,​ but only, as she writes, because it sounds too intrusive to call it G
​ od.​   
 
And it was Inger Christensen who wrote that humans ​are in the world​ in a similar way as the 
letters are in a book, and I love that idea: just as little as the letters know which novel they are a 
part of, just as little do we know what history our lives are included in.  
 
Thereby I started to write my own history, in a language that I was possessed by, but which 
wasn't mine, with an inner landscape where my own emotions and thoughts followed the path 
of others, in a place I called m ​ y self,​ which came to being in the same moment as it was r​ ealized,​  
that is, s​ een from the outside.​ It wasn't about understanding myself, but about challanging the 
understanding. It wasn't about pointing out a self, but to expand a self.  
 
 
 
It wasn't about getting close to me, but coming close to my languge about me. And the strange 
thing was that I so often completely lost myself out of sight when I was writing, I didn't know 
who I was or where I was, I followed a stream which brought me here and there, according to a 
logic which wasn't mine, but came from the language, came from the literature, no longer just 
from the outside, but from the inside, because everything we've ever read, everything we've 
seen, everything we've witnessed and everything we've experienced, exist inside of us, and it can 
be actualized in any moment, just not by the self.  
 
The self, I imagine it, is nothing but a way of dealing with this reservoir. If you get away from 
the self, like you do in dreams or in ecstacy, or when you read or write, it's as if the experiences, 
the ideas, the concepts, become stray, not belonging to anyone, just lying there. They are ours, 
but yet not made ours. They belong to a p​ otential self,​ they belong to t​ he unready,​ and it's in the 
unready, the always incipient, where the world and the writing meet.  
 
When I earlier tonight heard ​Per Wästberg​'s speech, it was as if it referred to a place where I've 
once been, a place I visited daily for three years, but which I no longer have access to.  
 
To be completely honest, the three fantastic speeches and the honorful prize, didn't just fill me 
with joy and pride, but also with sadness, because a prize is only awarded to something that is 
over, something that is completed, and with the completed comes the emptiness.  
 
In other words, the prize is awarded to something that I'm no longer a part of, to something 
which is behind a closed door, and which is already so strange to me that I simply didn't 
recognize the sentences Per Wästerberg quoted. Did I write that? Really?  
 
 
I've been standing by that closed door before. I've knocked on it, I've beaten and hammered on 
it, but violence has never helped, and will not. I stood outside that closed door when I was 20 
and wanted to become a writer, I stood outside of it again after I had published my first novel, 
and wanted to write a second one, for five years I stood there without it opening, and didn't I 
stand there again for my third book, it took four years that time.  
 
And now I'm standing there again.  
 
I use to say that it's very easy to write, but it's hard to reach the place where it's easy to write.  
The closed door is part of the writer's life. 
It's substantial that you can never know if the door will ever open. 
What kind of phenomena is this?  
What is the psychology of the closed door?  
What is it that you're locked out of?  
 
For two weeks I've been sitting, staring at the empty screen, trying to write this speech. It's as if 
I have nothing to say. And then, when I say something, it's as if it's not important enough to be 
said. While all this is going on, the children have gone to school and returned home again, 
clothes have been washed, food has been bought and dinner made. The table set up and cleared, 
the washing machine has been filled and emptied, the lamps have been turned off in every room 
and we have slept in our beds, before a new day has has arrived and I'm again sitting in front of 
the blank screen.  
 
What should be said?  
 
I mean, not just in this speech, but in literature in general. Should we praise the everyday life, 
and if so, why? Should we extract and display the essence of existence, and if so, why?  
 
And why did ​I​ think I should?  
 
The house we live in is filled with books. On the desk are those I've read in recent months, by 
authors such as Inger Christensen, E ​ mmanuel Carrère​, Martin Heidegger, H ​ ans Jonas​, ​Søren 
Kierkegaard​. They all fill me with a febrile sense of presence, but it's as if the thoughts are too 
great, the insights are too mighty to be able to use them for something - and they are also there 
already.  
 
I don't want to write about my own life again. 
 
But I do have a sentence.  
 
One meaning.  
 
It's about a woman who wakes up one morning in spring, she looks out through the window as 
she sits up in her bed, and suddenly she thinks that we're in hell. That it's this world that is hell. 
Not in a figurative sense, not in a way of saying that life is hard and merciless, but concretely and 
factually: what she sees, lawns between the highrises, the grove, the lampposts along the bike 
path, the high way and further, all of this is hell.  
 
The idea is easily identifiable, it comes from the many books on ​Gnosticism​ that I've read this 
winter and spring. Among the Gnostic cults that existed in the time of Christ and during the 
following centuries, there were many who considered that the God in the Bible, actually was the 
devil. It's an appealing, and actually closely related idea, because in one beat it solves the problem 
with goodness of God and the evil of the world.  
 
But how to write a novel from this? And why?  
 
Three years ago I published a series of books with short texts named after the seasons, and 
where the format was heavily influenced by the texts of Francis Ponge, texts which completely 
struck me when I read them as a 20 year old. In the first one of these books, ​About the autumn,​ I 
wrote a text which I immediately, when it appeared before me, thought could be the beginning 
of a longer story. I thought I would read it now, and then you can tell me if you agree:  
 
DAGUERREOTYPE 
 
The photography is affiliated with the modernity, and with something mechanical, it's part of 
our technological time, and part of what makes our culture different from the past. But the 
principle that some substances were more sensitive to light, and that the light could make 
imprints in them, was known at least since the middle ages, for example by ​Albertus Magnus​, 
Thomas Aquina​'s techer. He was a theologian and a philosopher, and was canonized before his 
death. It is rumoured that he was also an alchemist.  
 
There is something seductive about the idea that he, or some of the other aristotelians in the 
Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, in their study chambers, surrounded by liquids and 
substances, experimenting with silver nitrates, mercury, copper and glass, suddenly one day 
would managed to catch the light on a plate, turning their room into a developed negative.  
 
Technically speaking, it would have been possible, all the necessary substances and materials 
existed then as now. But using them to dipict the world, was so far away from their conceptions, 
their ideas about the world and what it meant to be a human, that it was unthinkable. Still, in a 
certain sense, this is where the photography arose, not through the insight that the silver nitrate 
embosses light, but through the slow turn of though towards the material world, which the 
natural philosophy represents.  
 
In the 1820's, the photography was no longer unthinkable, and many people experimented with 
photosensitive substances, among those ​Joseph Niépce​, whose p​ icture​ from Bourgogne, taken 
1826 or 1827, counts as the oldest preserved photography. It consists of some dark and bright 
parts on a metal plate, and it's so faint that it takes some time before you realize that the dark is 
housing walls and roofs, and the bright is the sky.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827), Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. 
 
 
Niépce took the picture from an attic window, what has been captured on the plate is his view 
this day. There is something ghostlike about all the photos from this time, and it's not only 
because of the misty, vague, kind of pensile motives - as if the material in the images belonged to 
another dimention - it's also because they don't depict humans. The exposure time was many 
hours long, so that only things which didn't move were fixed.  
 
That is perhaps the most increadible thing with these first photographies, that they relate to 
time in a way that only the most persistent becomes visible, and that the human appears so 
transient and brief that it doesn't make an imprint. For beings experiencing that time is slower 
than us, this is how the world must appear.  
 
Such an outside perspective wasn't unfamiliar, since the ​divine​, with the Lord and his angels, 
which one still believed in during this time, was unchanging and existed outside of time. In their 
eyes too, the humans must have been so brief and transient that they didn't appear.  
 
 
The first ever photography of a human was taken by L ​ ouis Daguerre​, eleven or twelve years 
after Niépce depicted the view outside his window, but also​ this one​ from a window, with a 
view over Boulevard du Temple, a morning in 1838, and also this one with such a long exposure 
time that only that which didn't move was fixed.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Photography of the Boulevard du Temple (1838), by Louis Daguerre. 

 
 
The street is sunlit, the row of trees casts shadows over the pavement, and all the details, from 
the many chimney pipes and ridges, to the window bars in the nearest white mansion, is sharp 
and clear. It's a horrible picture, because at this time of the day the streets should be filled with 
people, horses and carriages. But still there's only two. Precisely in the Golden Section, pretty far 
down towards the lower edge where a sunlit pavement begins, stands a man lifting his leg.  
 
Since I saw this this picture for the first time, I have imagined it's a picture of the devil. Being 
the only visible person on the actually crowded street, he's got a duration and a fixity which 
makes him stick to the daguerreotype. Something about the figure makes me think that in the 
next moment, he turned his head and looked up at the photographer. But the photographer 
didn't see what later appeared in picture. 
 
 
Louis Daguerre saw a crowded street, and maybe he didn't even notice the man, not until many 
hours later when the picture was developed and all the other figures, apart from this one, had 
disappeared.  
 
The devil is traditionally associated with the bodily, with the ​materalistic​ and the c​ oncrete,​ what 
they in the Bible calls​ the desires of the flesh,​ while God and the divine is all about the soul and the 
spirit, the immaterial and heavenly. Also the Gnostics, who normally turn everything on its 
head, agreed upon this idea. ​But what if it's the other way around?   
Last winter I was visiting my friend ​Stephen Gill​ in his house, just outside of Glemmingebro on 
Österlen. Stephen is a photographer and thus used to fix light mechanically, in pictures of the 
world. He always show me stuff, whether it's obscure photo books or old embroideries that he 
has found on some flea market.  
 
This day he pulled out an old Gramophone that he'd found somewhere. It was electroless and 
mechanical, you had to wind it up, the record started spinning, you put the needle down and 
immediately the music came streaming out the room in the almost scallopshaped funnel.  
 
The music could have been from the 20's or 30's.  
 
It was absolutely magical, because the actual transition between the physical, concrete reality and 
the immaterial music was visible. It also would have been, if there was an orchestra playing, but 
now there was no one else but us in the room - yet the music played out, loud and resounding. I 
remember I thought that it was as if the world itself was playing.  
 
That's where it all started, what would become our reality. In the mechanical camera and the 
mechanical Gramophone. The image and the sound was released from their origin and rose up, 
amplified into a sort of abstract heaven.  
 
But it wasn't diabolic, was it?  
 
Once, when I was nineteen years old, I read "​Doctor Faustus​" by ​Thomas Mann​. I was too 
young, there was a lot I couldn't understand, yet something I read had such a great impact on 
me, that I not only still remember it, but I can also claim that it later affected everything I ever 
written and thought about the world. The episode takes place in the beginning of the novel, 
when the two main characters, the narrator Serenus Zeitblom and the composer Adrian 
Leverkühn, are visiting Adrian, and his father, Johannes, who is interested in natural science, 
shows them some strange natural phenomenas.  
 
We're in the late 1800's, in a novel which unremittingly refers to the German Middle Ages and 
the Renaissance, so the alchemists as well as Faust and Luther constantly resonates. The episode 
is about how the dead materia can act in the same way as the living. Adrian, who would sell his 
soul to the devil and go under, in an aura of cold and darkness, finds it comical, while his friend 
Serenus is frightened.  
 
A grotesque little landscape of plants stretched up in a crystallization vessel, he writes, a tangled 
vegetation of blue, green and brown sprouts, reminiscent of algae, fungi, polyps, mosses, 
mussels, fruit flasks, small trees, limbs, and they moved, they bowed down to the light, even 
though they belonged to the matter and were not alive.  
 
I don't know why this passage made such a strong impression on me, and why I have always 
thought that it belongs to the most important and best things I have ever read, but perhaps it's 
the sum of all things gathered here: the living and the dead, the real and the false, the alchemy 
and the science, the devil and the modernity.  
 
And this place hasn't been dissolved since Mann created it in the 1940's, on the contrary, it has 
thickened, because since then, the localization and the analysis of DNA has arrived, and the 
possibility of manipulating the genome. As we know, Lucifer wanted to raise higher than God, 
he wanted to place his heart along with God's heart, and he was overthrown. Isn't it more 
reasonable that it is in ​his​ image we were created, rather than in the image of God?  
 
This is where my writing is today, in a completely different and much more conrete 
understanding of the collective: n​ ot who we are to each other,​ but what we do with ourselves.  
 
 
 
 
I want to thank the Academy who has honored my books in this fantastic manner, thanks to Per 
Wästberg, K ​ ristina Lugn​ and ​Anders Olsson​ for the incredibly beautiful and insightful speeches 
that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.  
 
I also want to thank everyone who helped me and made these books possible. ​Espen Stueland 
who I met when I was 20 and who introduced me to S​ amuel Beckett​, to ​Claude Simon​, to E ​ dith 
Södergran​ and to Tor Ulven, just to mention a few, and who generiously shared with me, all of 
his discoveries.  
 
I want to thank T ​ ore Renberg​, with whom I have been having a conversation about life and 
literature with, for almost 30 years now, and I want to thank G ​ eir Angell Øygarden​ who offered 
me his entire intellecutal property when I needed it the most, without asking for anything in 
return. During my work with "My Struggle", I read everything I had written to him, a total of 
5000 pages.  
 
I want to thank my former publisher at O ​ ctober​, Geir Bergdahl, who with his enthusiasm and 
wild suggestion that I should write twelve books in a year, suddenly made the impossible 
possible. And I want to thank my current publisher ​Ingeri Engelstad​ who dares to keep all the 
paths free, even those who don't lead to profit, a stance steadily as a stone wall, that all of us 
writers can lean on.  
 
But most of all I want to thank my editor G ​ eir Gulliksen​. Without him I wouldn't have been a 
writer - he picked me up from nowhere and said the redeeming words: ​I believe in you.​   
 
That was all what I needed in order to start writing. For 20 years now, we have collaborated, he 
has read absolutely everything I have ever written, even the smallest little note, and its 
unthinkable that I would print anything he hasn't read. He solves all of our issues, unties all the 
knots and he plants ideas, which a few months later, I believe to be my own. 
 
I want to thank my mother, Sissel Hatløy, who was the one who led me into the literature. I also 
want to thank my wife, Michal, who, in addition to giving my life color and warmth and hope 
and future, and which makes me think thoughts I have never thought before, is also the best 
reader I have ever met. 
 
Finally, I would like to thank my children, Vanja, Heidi, John, Anne and Tom, who, as they are 
such an important part of my life, also are an important part of my literature. Because life and 
literature is connected, although not always in the way we believe. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The text is translated from Norwegian to Swedish by Staffan Söderblom,   
and from Swedish to English by Alexander Sand.