Stieg Larsson

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Lore & Background

Stieg Larsson was born in Skelleftehamn, Sweden, on 15 August 1954. Until age nine, he lived with his grandparents in a small wooden house near the village of Bjursele in Norsjö Municipality, Västerbotten County. He earned a secondary diploma in social sciences in 1972 and served 16 months in the Swedish Army as a mortarman in Kalmar County. In his early 20s, he changed his first name from Stig to Stieg to avoid confusion with a friend who became a well-known author. Larsson was an avid science fiction reader from an early age and became active in Swedish science fiction fandom around 1971. He co-edited his first fanzine, Sfären, in 1972, and through the 1970s published around 30 additional fanzine issues. He was president of the largest Swedish science-fiction fan club, Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction, in 1978–79. He later engaged in far-left political activism, joining the Communist Workers' League and editing the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen. He spent parts of 1977 in Eritrea training a squad of female Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas in mortar use, but contracted a kidney disease and returned to Sweden. He worked as a graphic designer at the largest Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, between 1977 and 1999. His political convictions led him to found the Swedish Expo Foundation, similar to the British Searchlight Foundation, to counteract the growth of the extreme right. He became editor of the foundation's magazine, Expo, in 1995. His research into right-wing extremism resulted in his first book, Extremhögern (The Extreme Right), in 1991. He lived for years under death threats from his political enemies, and the Sweden Democrats were a major subject of his research.

Reader's Guide

Stieg Larsson's significance lies primarily in his Millennium series, which became a global publishing phenomenon after his death. He had originally planned a series of 10 books and had completed two and most of a third when he began looking for publishers. The first trilogy was published posthumously starting in 2005. The first book, Män som hatar kvinnor (English: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), was awarded the Glass Key award as the best Nordic crime novel in 2005. The second novel, Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), received the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2006. The third novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest), became the bestselling book in the United States in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly. Larsson was the second-best-selling fiction author in the world for 2008, behind Afghan-American novelist Khaled Hosseini. By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide. The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to write the next trilogy, and Karin Smirnoff to write the third trilogy in the series, which has eight novels as of December 2025. Larsson left about three-quarters of a fourth novel on a notebook computer, now possessed by his partner, Eva Gabrielsson. The Swedish film production company Yellow Bird produced film versions of the Millennium series, all released in 2009 in Scandinavia. Sony Pictures released a film adaptation of the first book, directed by David Fincher, in 2011; plans for sequels were ultimately scrapped.

Did You Know?

• Larsson changed his first name from Stig to Stieg in his early 20s to avoid confusion with a friend who became a well-known author.
• He spent 16 months in compulsory military service training as a mortarman in an infantry unit in Kalmar County.
• In 1977, he trained a squad of female Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of mortars.
• He lived for years under death threats from his political enemies due to his research into right-wing extremism.
• The third novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, was the bestselling book in the United States in 2010.