Chairperson: Selina Guinness

Most authors draw to some extent on their own history. But what compels a writer to adopt a confessional or ultra-realist tone? Does laying bare one’s own experience add an urgency and piquancy to the writer’s prose? Or should candour always be tempered by a degree of distance?

Novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard is a huge star in his native Norway where his latest book, A Death in the Family, has become something of a cause célèbre due to the merciless frankness of its autobiographical tone. Vital, compelling and often hilarious, it traces the various events, allegiances, divisions and secrets that have shaped the author’s own life.

Like Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk has forensically dissected the anatomy of her own life to create a powerful and resonant body of work. From her Whitbread-nominated debut novel Saving Agnes to A Life’s Work – a personal exploration of motherhood – her writing is characterised by the pinpoint precision of her observations and her unflinching honesty. Her latest book, Aftermath, sees her at her most candid and rigorous as she chronicles the breakup of her own ten-year marriage.

Here both authors discuss the precarious dance between the imagined and the real in the creation of fictions and telling of stories.