Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award goes to Karl Ove Knausgård with the following justification:
“Like no other contemporary European intellectual, the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård has, in the great tradition of confessions from Saint Augustine to Rousseau, over the Swedish context of the first-person narrative with Strindberg and Jan Myrdal, against the narrow one- eyed cultural view of the cyclops, uncompromisingly and with the contemplator’s hypnotic presence in life, fixed his gaze on and portrayed his boundless struggle to become, be and remain human in an apocalyptically unequal world. In this way, in essays and novels, he has constantly widened and deepened the spatial and temporal domains of literature, the condensation of existence towards the extreme pain spots of miraculous life and the potentially infinite freedom of art.”
