Stieg Larsson
Karl Stig-Erland “Stieg” Larsson (/stiːɡ ˈlɑːrsən/, Swedish: [ˈkɑːɭ stiːɡ ˈæ̌ːɭand ˈlɑ̌ːʂɔn]; 15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after the author died suddenly of a heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only). The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels as of September 2019. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
He was the second-best-selling fiction author in the world for 2008, owing to the success of the English translation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, behind the Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini.[1] The third and final novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, became the bestselling book in the United States in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly.[2] By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide.[3]
Stieg Larsson was born on 15 August 1954, as Karl Stig-Erland Larsson, in Skelleftehamn, Västerbottens län, Sweden, where his father and maternal grandfather worked in the Rönnskärsverken smelting plant. Suffering from arsenic poisoning, his father resigned from his job, and the family subsequently moved to Stockholm. Because of their cramped living conditions, though, they chose to let one-year-old Larsson remain behind. So until the age of nine, Larsson lived with his grandparents in a small wooden house in the countryside, near the village of Bjursele in Norsjö Municipality, Västerbotten County.[4] He attended the village school and used cross-country skis to get to and from school during the long, snowy winters in northern Sweden. He loved the experience of living there.
In the book “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me, Eva Gabrielsson describes this as Larsson’s motivation for setting part of his first novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in northern Sweden, which Gabrielsson calls “godforsaken places at the back of beyond.”
Larsson was not as fond of the urban environment in the city of Umeå, where he moved to live with his parents after his grandfather, Severin Boström, died of a heart attack at age 50. Larson earned a secondary diploma in social sciences in 1972. He then applied to the Joint Colleges of Journalism in Stockholm, Sweden but failed the entrance examination. In 1974, Larsson was drafted into the Swedish Army, under the conscription law, and spent 16 months in compulsory military service, training as a mortarman in an infantry unit in Kalmar.[citation needed]
His mother Vivianne also died early, in 1991, from complications of breast cancer and an aneurysm.[5]
