AnnickPress

Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on a February night at four o’clock in the morning, when the night was at its coldest. Soon after, his family moved to the melancholic island of Sveg, the frozen blue heart of H�rjedalen, and that is where he grew up with his father and siblings. Today, Mankell is one of Sweden’s most widely read authors. He writes books for children, teenagers and grown-ups.

For as long as he can remember, Henning has had a passion for writing. “Since the day I learnt to write, I have known that I couldn’t be anything other than an author,” he recalls. “I can still remember the feeling of dizziness and pleasure whilst writing stories in first or second grade. And I imagine that the desire, which I discovered at that time, is still the determining factor today: the wish to tell a story. I have never had any doubts about what to do in life. Writing was what I wanted to do and what I, at an early age, felt I was able to do. No other dreams were strong enough to stand in the way.

“We moved to Bor�s and I lived through gloomy years in school. A couple of years before graduating, I left for good. I didn't have the patience to wait—as I felt—for nothing. I went to Paris when I was sixteen and stayed there for a year. That year I became a person, I think. I became conscious about how endlessly different human conditions can be—miles away from the picture I had built up during my childhood in a small Swedish town! I discovered a world that was wounded and harrowed, unjust and imperfect —and within it oases of irrepressible resistance and will to live. I was so stunned that I did the only thing possible: I didn't write a single word. I earned my living by repairing clarinets in a strange little workshop in Belleville.

“I returned to Sweden, where I ended up at a preparatory theater school in Skara. There I gained a couple of lifelong friends, and when I was twenty I moved to Stockholm and got my first assignment as a stage manager. I wrote my first plays—and that’s how it all started. My first novel came out in 1973 and my first novel for teenagers the year after. And so on. I have divided my time between writing drama and novels and stage- managing.

“In the early seventies, I went to Africa. The wish to go there had existed inside me as a diffuse but tempting need ever since I was a child. And since then I have kept on returning. I have lived many years in Africa and in Mozambique, and I have helped to build up a national, professional theater there.”

Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander detective series has sold millions of copies throughout the world. He spends at least half a year in Mozambique running the Teatro Avenida and writing.  Mozambique is the setting for Henning’s powerful young adult novel Secrets in the Fire (2003), based on real-life land-mine survivor Sofia Alface. In his latest book, Shadow of the Leopard ( 2009), Sofia has become a young woman with two small children, who struggles to make ends meet.

In 2008, Henning Mankell was given an honorary doctorate at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; he has also received the honor of sitting on the jury for the Berlin Film Festival, 2009.