Stieg Larsson with Gabrielsson in Strangnas, Sweden. Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson were together for their entire adult lives, but the couple was never married.
Stieg Larsson took a huge interest in the murder investigation of former Prime Minister Olof Palme in the 1980s. Photo: Leif Blom / SCANPIX.
Connections
life partner: Eva Gabrielsson
2009
Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson's partner, in Stockholm. Excluded in the division of his estate, she still has a coveted possession: an unfinished fourth novel. Credit Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times.
Brother: Joakim Larsson
Joakim Larsson
Father: Erland Larsson
Erland Larsson
collaborator: Elsie Anna-Lena Lodenius
Elsie Anna-Lena Lodenius, journalist, lecturer, author from Sweden.
(Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading publisher of the magazine M...)
Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past.
(In the third volume of the Millennium series, Lisbeth Sal...)
In the third volume of the Millennium series, Lisbeth Salander lies in critical condition in a Swedish hospital, a bullet in her head. But she's fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she'll stand trial for three murders. With the help of Mikael Blomkvist, she'll need to identify those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she'll seek revenge - against the man who tried to killer her and against the corrupt government institutions that nearly destroyed her life.
(Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest fam...)
Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.
The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist
(Now almost exclusively known as the author of the bestsel...)
Now almost exclusively known as the author of the bestselling Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson was first and foremost a professional journalist and an untiring crusader for democracy and equality. Collected in English for the first time, the articles in this volume explore the human rights issues that formed the ideological foundation of his explosive trio of novels.
Lisbeth Salander - obstinate outsider, volatile seeker of justice for herself and others - seizes on a chance to unearth her mysterious past once and for all. And she will let nothing stop her - not the Islamists she enrages by rescuing a young woman from their brutality; not the prison gang leader who passes a death sentence on her; not the deadly reach of her long-lost twin sister, Camilla; and not the people who will do anything to keep buried knowledge of a sinister pseudoscientific experiment known only as The Registry. Once again, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are the fierce heart of a thrilling full-tilt novel that takes on some of the world's most insidious problems.
Stieg Larsson is a famous Swedish journalist, activist, and writer. He received notoriety as an award-winning Swedish author with his work being published in the early part of the 21st Century. His crime novels, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, were published after his death, have sold 80 million copies and have made Stieg Larsson a global celebrity.
Background
Stieg Larsson was born on August 15, 1954, in Skelleftehamn near the northern Swedish city of Skelleftea, where his father, Erland Larsson, and maternal grandfather, Severin Bostrom, worked in the Ronnskarsverken smelting plant. Owing to his suffering from arsenic poisoning, his father had to leave his job. The family subsequently moved to Stockholm, but, because of their cramped living conditions in Stockholm, they chose to let their one-year-old son remain behind with his grandparents. He lived with his grandparents until the age of nine near the village of Bjursele in Norsjö Municipality, Västerbotten County. However, his grandfather died of a heart attack at age 50. His mother Vivianne also died early, in 1991, from complications with breast cancer and an aneurysm.
Education
Larsson first attended the village school. He started to write stories at an early age and at twelve he penned down his first novel in a notebook. Upon finding their child’s talent, his parents gifted him a typewriter at his thirteenth birthday. Then, at the end of the 70s, Stieg moved to Stockholm and took his first few serious steps towards becoming a full-time journalist. Not being admitted to a formal education in journalism he worked extra as a freelance writer.
After finishing school and two years in the Swedish Army, Larsson found employment at the post office and wrote freelance articles for magazines willing to publish his texts. Slowly, and with much hard work, his luck started turning and Stieg eventually landed a job in 1977 as a researcher at Swedens largest news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyra. He would remain for a decade in various capacities, researcher and illustrator, to finally reach the position of feature-writer for the agency. Working as a researcher Stieg was on the bottom rung in the journalistic hierarchy, but he relished the opportunity the research gave him to become a more knowledgeable, and therefore better, writer.
During this time he became an active member of the Swedish left-wing movement. Continuing to be interested in the Vietnam War, he edited an obscure magazine, which was a branch of the Trotskyist Fourth International, an organization of followers of Leo Trotsky, whose goal was helping the working class overthrow capitalism and work toward international Communism.
In the early 1980s, he became the Scandinavian correspondent of “Searchlight,” a British magazine dedicated to anti-fascism and anti-racism. And during the 1980s he became a regular writer of "Internationalen", a weekly newspaper of the "Socialist Party". He also independently researched on right-wing extremism that led him to bring out his first book on the subject, Extremhögern (The Extreme Right) in 1991 co-authored with Anna-Lena Lodenius. Thereafter he played a prominent role in documentation of several right-wing extremist organisations.
In 1995, he was the main force behind the founding of the Swedish magazine, “Expo,” which supported many of the same ideas of “Searchlight.” With his workaholic personality, he work full-time for two years at both magazines, but eventually put all his effort into “Expo.”
From 1999 to his death, he was the chief editor of “Expo.” Publicly, he made many enemies with his political publications. He and members of his staff were found to be under surveillance; his office burglarized destroying property; and photos of him and his long-time girlfriend were found in possession of a Neo-Nazis group. At his death, he had accumulated 20 boxes of research on the unsolved assassination of left-wing political Swedish figure, Sven Olof Joachim Palme.
He never abandoned his passion for writing a novel, especially science fiction or crime fiction. In the 1990s, he drafted the trilogy of crime novels, which were eventually released under English titles: in 2005 “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” in 2006 “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” and in 2007 “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.” Although the first novel was submitted to a publisher, he died before any of his novels were in print. These novels have been translated not only from Swedish to English, but several other languages.
Larsson’s novels have become international best-sellers with a total of 80 million copies sold of the trilogy reaching over $40 million. He was the first author to have more than one million e-books purchased on Amazon. His original three Millennium novels have remained popular to this day. The novels have been adapted into films.
His awards and honors are numerous: In 2006 and 2008 the “Glass Key Award”; in 2008 the “Best Swedish Crime Novel Award” and for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the “British ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for International Author of the Year” and the South African “Exclusive Books Boeke Prize;” in 2009 for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the “Galaxy British Book Award” for crime thriller and Anthony Award for the “Best First Novel” and also that year, from Spain the “General Council of the Judiciary Award” for his contribution to fight against domestic violence; and in 2010 the USA Today's “Author of the Year” award.
Another Larsson’s achievement was in the establishment in 1995 of the Swedish Expo Foundation with the aim of studying and mapping anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in society.
Larsson was an atheist. Here is his view on the subject of faith that he stated himself: “No, I don’t believe in God, but I respect the fact that you do. Everyone has to have something to believe in.”
Politics
Stieg Larsson's father was a Communist while his mother was a noted Social Democrat. Thus political atmosphere prevailed in his home. His grandfather Severin Boström, an ardent anti-fascist was a dedicated political activist who protested against the Nazis and faced confinement at the time of World War II. As Larsson spent most of his early childhood with his grandparents, his personality was much influenced by them especially by his grandfather who he would cite as his role model.
Like many of his generation, Stieg had grown up with a political vision - in his case, Trotskyism. He became associated with a radical leftist group "Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet" and through them, he edited a Trotskyist journal "Fjärde internationalen" for a while. Larsson even spent parts of 1977 in Eritrea, training a squad of female Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of mortars. Larsson left Swedish Socialist Party at 1987, when he refused to protect socialistic regimes of the doubtful democratic content.
Larsson started engaging heavily with far-left political activism during his writing career. He joined his local branch of the Communist Workers’ League, and researched right-wing extremism in Sweden in his spare time. He even published a book on the subject in 1991. In 1995, he established the Swedish Expo Foundation “with the aim of studying and mapping anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in society”. He also wanted the Foundation to protect “democracy and freedom of speech [in Sweden] against racist, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and totalitarian tendencies”. He also became the editor of the foundation’s magazine, Expo. He spoke publicly about right-wing extremism, and fast became instrumental in exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organisations. He was subjected to heavy criticism and hate for this, and even received death threats.
Larsson spent much of his life as an activist, actively campaigning against “the growth of the extreme right and the white power-culture in schools and among young people” that he felt was prevalent in Swedish society.
Views
Stieg chose the criminal genre because it served his goal of describing a darker side of modern society but also because he knew it well, having written many articles on crime writers and their books as a feature writer.
Meticulous research combined with a sense of discipline and productivity, the ability to sit down and write until the writing was done, (he kept writing at odd hours for the rest of his working life), would become necessary traits in Stieg as a writer and in his journalism, aimed to expose the racist and neo-nazi movements that were once again emerging in Europe.
More or less everything he wrote depicts women who are attacked, women who are raped, women who are ill-treated and murdered because they challenge patriarchy. Stieg wanted to do something about this senseless violence.
Also, Steig has mentioned in many of his interviews that he is inspired by American and British authors of crime fiction.
Quotations:
"To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it's an absolute duty."
"In real life, people are integrated into society. That's what happens in my books as well. Minor characters don't just walk in and spout lines, they interact and have an effect on the events. It's not an isolated universe."
"I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties."
"Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course."
"I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire."
"I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters."
"I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences."
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
"In many respects I have gone out of my way to avoid the usual approach adopted in crime novels. I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed - the presentation of Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, is based exclusively on the personal case study made by Lisbeth Salander."
"In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine."
"I have been threatened occasionally. But that happens to everybody who is writing this kind of things. Threats will come without fail. It might happen to the most 'innocent' texts. If it gets too much we call the police."
"I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct."
"I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn't have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn't listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes."
"I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside."
"I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters."
"Every year Swedish society produces a new generation of threatened women who can testify to the lack of legal rights and the lukewarm interest shown by the police and other authorities."
Membership
Larsson became active in the Scandinavian SF Society in 1971, of which he was a board member in 1978 and 1979, and chairman in 1980. Also, during 1978-79, he was a member and president of the "Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction", the largest science-fiction fan club of Sweden.
Personality
Steig’s grandfather, who was imprisoned during the World War II and what happened with him thereafter, had a deep impact in shaping his personality. In time the library also became an important factor in Stieg's life. His favorite books were the adventure stories by Jules Verne.
Also, there was a crucial impact on Larsson's personality after he witnessed a rape when he was 15 and was helpless to stop it. This event haunted him for the rest of his life. The girl being raped was named Lisbeth, which he later used as the name of the heroine on his Millenium trilogy. Sexual violence against women is also a recurring theme in his work.
Larsson's first name was originally Stig, which is the standard spelling. In his early twenties, he changed it to avoid confusion with his friend Stig Larsson, who would go on to become a well-known author well before Stieg did. He worked intensely, and can also be called a workaholic, as he spent 90% of his time writing day and night.
Physical Characteristics:
Around 1977 Larsson suffered from kidney disease, which forced him to leave the job training a battalion of female guerrillas of the "Eritrean People's Liberation Front" on the use of grenade launchers.
Later in life, when he was fifty-years-old, he also suffered a fatal heart attack after climbing the stairs to the Expo offices. The heart attack was caused by his unhealthy lifestyle. He was known to have poor health habits, such as a diet of high-fat fast foods, smoking as many as 60 strong, hand-rolled cigarettes daily, never exercising, drinking gallons of coffee daily, and manically working into the night and reporting to work with 2 hours of sleep.
Quotes from others about the person
Larsson's father Erland once mentioned: "I saw him writing children's books. I told him there was too much sex in the first book and he said, "Oh, Dad. Sex sells."
His brother Joakim adds: "He told me he had based some of the character of Lisbeth Salander on my daughter Therese, who has a rose tattoo. She also had anorexia when she was younger. They exchanged hundreds of emails and Stieg questioned her about her illness and how she felt as a teenager."
Interests
Writers
Sara Paretsky, Agatha Christie, Val McDermid, Dorothy Sayers, Elizabeth George and Enid Blyton, Astrid Lindgren, Jules Verne
Connections
Stieg Larsson was in a long term relationship with architecture historian Eva Gabrielsson whom he met in 1972 during an anti-Vietnam rally. They remained together throughout his life but could not marry due to security risks. The Swedish Law needs couples, who intend to marry, to mention their addresses publicly. This would have posed life risk for Stieg Larsson who for long had received death threats.
Since Eva Gabrielsson was not married to him, all his properties inclusive of royalties to be received from further book sales belong to his father and brother. According to Eva Gabrielsson, he was not in much contact with his father and brother, which the duo denies. Gabrielsson has refused to hand over his laptop to his family that contains his unfinished novel and the two sides are yet to solve this dispute of controlling his legacy.
Father:
Erland Larsson
Mother:
Vivianne Bostrom
life partner:
Eva Gabrielsson
Brother:
Joakim Larsson
Grandfather:
Severin Bostrom
collaborator:
Elsie Anna-Lena Lodenius
Elsie Anna-Lena Lodenius (born June 30, 1958, in Norrtälje, Stockholm) is a Swedish journalist, author, and lecturer. She is best known for her studies of autonomous. extreme nationalist movements and right-wing populism. She has published articles in Expressen, Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Ordfront, Månadsjournalen, and Arena. Larsson co-authored with her on his first book on the subject, Extremhogern (The Extreme Right) in 1991.
The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson
In the Man Who Left Too Soon, top crime fiction journalist Barry Forshaw gives us a fascinating insight into the life and works of this difficult, brilliant and multifaceted man.
For his work "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (original name "Män som hatar kvinnor" – literally – Men who hate women) as the best Nordic crime novel in 2005. In 2006 for his novel, Män som hatar kvinnor, and in 2008 for his novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes.
For his work "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (original name "Män som hatar kvinnor" – literally – Men who hate women) as the best Nordic crime novel in 2005. In 2006 for his novel, Män som hatar kvinnor, and in 2008 for his novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes.
Best Swedish Crime Novel Award,
Sweden
This award was won in 2006 for Larsson's work "The Girl Who Played with Fire".
This award was won in 2006 for Larsson's work "The Girl Who Played with Fire".
Glass Key Award,
Sweden
Larsson was awarded for his "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" ("Luftslottet som sprängdes") in 2008.
Larsson was awarded for his "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" ("Luftslottet som sprängdes") in 2008.
ITV3 Crime Thriller Award,
United Kingdom
This award was given to Larsson in 2008 for International Author of the Year for his novel "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".
This award was given to Larsson in 2008 for International Author of the Year for his novel "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".
Exclusive Books Boeke Prize,
South Africa
Larsson was honoured with it for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in 2008.
Larsson was honoured with it for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in 2008.
Galaxy British Book Awards,
United Kingdom
In 2009, Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".
In 2009, Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".
General Council of the Judiciary,
Spain
For his contribution to the fight against domestic violence, 2009.
For his contribution to the fight against domestic violence, 2009.
United States of America Today's Author of the Year,
United States
2010
2010
Anthony Award
Best First Novel, for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2009.
Best First Novel, for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2009.
