Home and Away : Writing the Beautiful Game

Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times and Evening Standard

Karl Ove Knausgaard is sitting at home in Skåne with his wife, four small children and a dog. He is watching football on TV and falls asleep in front of the set. He likes 0-0 draws, cigarettes, coffee and Argentina.

Fredrik Ekelund is away in Brazil, where he plays football on the beach and watches matches with friends. Fredrik loves games that end up 4-3 and teams that play beautiful football. He likes caipirinhas and Brazil.

In Home and Away, two writers use football and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to reflect on life and death, art and politics, class and literature and the most important question: was this the best football championship ever?

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 novel A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle: Book 1, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. My Struggle: Book 1 was a New Yorker Book of the Year and My Struggle: Book 2 was listed among The Wall Street Journal’s 2013 Books of the Year. My Struggle is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and four children.

Fredrik Ekelund was born in Sweden in 1953. He published his first book, Stuv Malmö, in 1984, and has since published another sixteen works―novels, detective novels, collections of poetry, and three books about soccer. Ekelund is also a playwright, and has made two films (with documentary filmmaker Lars Westman), as well as working as a translator specializing in Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.