Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser (born 21 February 1950) is a Swedish author and teacher who has written a number of successful novels, mostly but not only crime fiction. He has won Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times, and his novel Carambole won the prestigious Glass Key award in 2000. His books have been translated from Swedish into more than twenty languages.

Håkan Nesser, Bremen, 2009

Early life

Håkan Nesser was born and grew up in Kumla, Örebro County. His first novel was published in 1988.[1] He worked as a teacher in Uppsala until 1998 when he became a full-time author. In August 2006, Håkan Nesser and his wife Elke (a psychiatrist)[2] moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A few years later the couple moved to London[3] since it was easier for his wife to find work there.[4] Having returned to Sweden, they now live in Stockholm and on the island Furillen in the Baltic Sea.[5]

Characters and themes

A recurring main character is called Van Veeteren, a detective in the early novels and later the owner of an antique books shop. These books play out in a fictitious city called Maardam, said to be located in northern Europe in a country which is never named but resembles Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. The names however are mostly Dutch.

With his 2006 crime novel Människa utan hund ("Human without Dog") Nesser introduced a new main character, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent. He has remained the main protagonist in Nesser's crime books since then. Barbarotti is a more upbeat character than Van Veeteren and the books are firmly set in Sweden, although the town of Kymlinge is fictitious and named after an "abandoned tube station" in Stockholm.

In August 2011 he hinted on his own site that a future book (which became The Living and the Dead in Winsford) would take place in the "county of Somerset".[6]

Bibliography

Inspector Van Veeteren
  • 1993 – Det grovmaskiga nätet; English translation: The Mind's Eye, 2008
  • 1994 – Borkmanns punkt; English translation: Borkmann's Point, 2006
  • 1995 – Återkomsten; English translation: The Return, 2007
  • 1996 – Kvinna med födelsemärke; English translation: Woman with Birthmark, 2009
  • 1997 – Kommissarien och tystnaden; English translation: The Inspector and Silence, 2010
  • 1998 – Münsters fall: English translation: The Unlucky Lottery, 2011 (Münster's Case, USA, 2012)
  • 1999 – Carambole; English translation: Hour of the Wolf, 2012
  • 2000 – Ewa Morenos fall; English translation: The Weeping Girl, 2013
  • 2001 – Svalan, katten, rosen, döden; English translation: The Strangler's Honeymoon, 2013
  • 2003 – Fallet G; English translation: The G File, 2014

Inspector Barbarotti
  • 2006 – Människa utan hund; English translation: The Darkest Day, 2017
  • 2007 – En helt annan historia; English translation: The Root of Evil, 2018
  • 2008 – Berättelse om herr Roos; English translation: The Secret Life of Mr. Roos, 2020
  • 2010 – De ensamma'; English translation: The Lonely Ones, 2022
  • 2012 – Styckerskan från Lilla Burma'; English translation: The Axe Woman, 2022
  • 2020 – Den sorgsne busschauffören från Alster
  • 2021 – Schack under vulkanen

Other novels
  • 1988 – Koreografen
  • 1996 – Barins triangel
  • 1998 – Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö; English translation by Saskia Vogel: A Summer with Kim Novak (2015), The Summer of Kim Novak (2020)
  • 1999 – Flugan och evigheten
  • 2002 – Och Piccadilly Circus ligger inte i Kumla
  • 2002 – Kära Agnes!
  • 2004 – Skuggorna och regnet
  • 2005 – Från doktor Klimkes horisont
  • 2009 – Maskarna på Carmine Street
  • 2011 – Himmel över London
  • 2014 – Levande och döda i Winsford; English translation: The Living and the Dead in Winsford (2015)
  • 2016 – Eugen Kallmanns ögon
  • 2017 – Nortons filosofiska memoarer; English translation: Norton's Philosophical Memoirs (2018)
  • 2018 – INTRIGO (a collection of novellas: Tom (2018); Rein (1996); Dear Agnes (2002); The Flower from Samaria (2005); All the Information in the Case (2005))
  • 2018 – De vänsterhäntas förening
  • 2019 – Halvmördaran

Filmography
  • Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret's Lake (Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö) 2005
  • Van Veeteren series
    • Det grovmaskiga nätet (2000, TV)
    • Återkomsten (2001, TV)
    • Kvinna med födelsemärke (2001, TV)
    • Münsters fall (2005)
    • Carambole (2005)
    • Borkmanns punkt (2005)
    • Moreno och tystnaden (2006)
    • Svalan, katten, rosen, döden (2006)
    • Fallet G (2006)

Awards

References
  1. "Håkan Nesser's biography". nesser.se. Retrieved 4 February 2019.
  2. The Sunday Times, 2009-05-10
  3. "Håkan Nesser".
  4. "Med rätt att döda".
  5. Åkesson, Johan (3 August 2009). "Furillen – drömmen om en egen måne" [Furillen – The dream of having a moon of your own]. dn.se. Dagens Nyheter. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  6. Rapporter Archived 20 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  7. "Medaljförläningar 28 januari 2019" (in Swedish). Royal court of Sweden. Archived from the original on 29 January 2019. Retrieved 31 January 2019.
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