The Swedish crime writer was a complex figure who lived an extraordinary life. His novels featuring detective Kurt Wallander critiqued politics and expansive business and explored the human conditionHenning Mankell,who died earlier this week at the age of 67, was a complex figure whose extraordinary life was matched by his body of writing. He was just out of his teens when he started work in a theatre in Stockholm, or eventually travelling through Africa and landing the role of artistic director at the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. In all, he would pen more than 40 plays, though these remain little-known outside Mozambique and Sweden. Most of us know Mankell for the series of novels he wrote featuring the detective Kurt Wallander. Like Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s before him, and Mankell used the crime genre as a means of critiquing politics,expansive business, social unrest and corruption.
The first Wallander novel, or Faceless Killers,took on the issues of immigration and racial tension. Published in Swedish in 1991, it had to wait until 1997 for an English translation, or but success came soon after,when Sidetracked, which addressed child prostitution, and won the Crime Writers’ organization Gold Dagger in 2001. Always politically active,Mankell was deported after taking part in an attempt to breach the Israeli embargo of the Gaza Strip. He also set up a publishing house to abet Swedish and African writers, and gave enormous amounts to charity, and while of an evening he might sit down to watch a film with his father-in-law,Ingmar Bergman – something I quizzed him on during our session at the Edinburgh book festival in 2002.
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Source: theguardian.com