Background
He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and lives in Stockholm.
He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and lives in Stockholm.
A helicopter pilot, he is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Swedish Air Force and the only Swedish pilot who has trained with the United States. Marines. In May 2015, his novel The Swede received a starred review in Publishers Weekly.
HarperCollins had purchased the thriller for publication in the United States. in 2013.
Publishers in other ten countries followed suit, including France, Brazil, Israel and Germany. The novel, which has been compared to Homeland (television series), looks at the complex consequences of the War on Terror.
The print run in English is 40,000 hardcover. In the United Kingdom, the thriller"s title is My Name Is North. With this book, Karjel joins the list of Scandinavian noir crime writers (many of them Swedish) with international exposure.
On July 31, 2015, the Guardian online ran his article discussing controversy over a thriller with a bisexual hero.
In 2013, 20th Century Fox Television bought the rights to The Swede for adaptation as a television drama. As of 2015, the series remains under development by Chernin Entertainment and Yellow Bird (company), the Swedish film production company known for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009 film) and its sequels. Karjel grew up in the small city of Örebro, the son of a Swedish mother, Solveig, and an Estonian father, Raivo.
His father escaped Estonia as a child at the end of World World War World War II "Perhaps my mixed Swedish-Estonian background created a permanent inner tension," Karjel wrote in an author profile.
"The almost mythic stories of heroism I heard growing up clashed with the dullness of the Swedish suburb where I lived."
In 2010, Karjel commanded a helicopter squadron on the ship HSwMS Carlskrona (P04), as part of the European Union"s Operation Atalanta fighting Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. He was interviewed during the mission in a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary film, The Trouble with Pirates.
From 2011 to 2013, he directed an $800 million program for the Swedish Air Force, procuring Black Hawk helicopters for medivac operations in Afghanistan. In 2005, he was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, where he wrote much of The Swede.
In 2013, he held a writer"s residency at Ledig House, Omi International Arts Center, upstate New New York
He lectures frequently on the topic of leadership under pressure. In February 2014, he was named Speaker of the Year in Sweden.