Author of the week: Henning Mankell

last updated 8 January 2015

Henning Mankell, the dean of contemporary Swedish crime fiction, never doubted what he wanted to do with his life, said David Robinson in the Edinburgh Scotsman. In 1964, just after he turned 16, he committed himself to a writing career while sitting in a Latin class. “I decided that when the school bell rang at the end of it, I would leave school and never come back again. So the bell rang and I did just that.” His father, a judge, needed only a day to accept that the decision made sense. “He could see how dedicated I was.” A mere three years later, Mankell’s first play made his reputation in Sweden, and his novels have sold more than 35 million copies worldwide in the decades since. Yet only with his latest novel, The Man From Beijing, did he finally become a best-selling author in the U.S.

Mankell isn’t slowing down, said Nicholas Wroe in the London Guardian. His most famous character, the depressive Detective Kurt Wallander, will take his final bow in a book that will be published in English next year. Meanwhile, he is writing a new novel that “has nothing to do with crime,” and working on a BBC miniseries about his late father-in-law, the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. “Look, I’m a storyteller,” he says. “The day that my creativity goes is the day I go, too. I won’t find any reason to live anymore. This is not self-dramatic, this is not romantic. This is a very serious fact. As long as I have this feeling for creativity, I will go on living.”