Henning Mankell, author of Wallander series, dead at 67
Sadaf Ahsan
"My driving force is the same as all artists and authors. To try to understand the time and the world one lives in. ...I want to know why I have lived by the time I…
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Henning Mankell, the 67-year-old internationally beloved Swedish crime writer died early Monday, his publisher, Leopard, said in a statement.

The author, who sold over 40 million copies of his novels and plays worldwide, revealed he had cancer just last year, writing about his experience in his last book, Quicksand: What It Means To Be A Human Being. He died in the southwestern city of Goteborg.

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Speaking to NPR last year about his cancer diagnosis, Mankell said, “It was a catastrophe for me. Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I’d die of something else.”

Like most other people, I want to know why I have lived by the time I die

Wallander, his internationally best-selling series, followed policeman Kurt Wallander through Sweden and Mozambique, and was eventually turned into a BAFTA Award-winning TV series starring Kenneth Branagh.

The first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers, was published in 1991, concluding in 2009 with the 10th novel, The Troubled Man. The books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

Mankell’s has been credited for paving the way for other Scandinavian authors around the world, including The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson and Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo.

“It was never my intention to write crime novels as such, but to use the crime as a sort of mirror of a society and of a time. That is my starting point and I know that very many of those who are called crime writers today, they don’t do that,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Associated Press.

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Since the mid-1980s, he divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran a theatre company and helped build a village for orphaned children to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS.

There, he was active in the “memory books” project, which encourages parents with HIV to record their stories and experiences for future generations.

“My driving force is, I guess, the same as all artists and authors,” Mankell said to the AP. “To try to understand the time and the world one lives in. Like most other people, I want to know why I have lived by the time I die.”

He is survived by his wife of 17 years, Eva Bergman – the daughter of Ingmar Bergman’s second wife, the dancer Ellen Lundstrom – and his son, Jon Mankell, a film producer.

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