Mankell was actively involved in social issues most of his life.
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Mankell was one of Sweden’s most frequently performed dramatists. It was Larsson’s success that hooked Anglophone readers on Scandi crime, allowing Mankell to be transformed into a popular favourite after many years of critical acclaim but slim sales in the United Kingdom and US. His Wallander novels has been turned into a movies and TV series, the title character played by three actors – Swedes Rolf Lassgard and Krister Henriksson, and an actor more widely known to American audiences, Kenneth Branagh, the BBC reported.
Mankell’s Swedish publisher Leopard said that best-selling crime novelist died in his sleep early this morning (5 October) in Gothenburg. He has said he started dreaming of becoming an author from the day his grandmother taught him how to write. He went on to live in Paris for a year and a half before returning to Sweden, where he started working as a stagehand at a Stockholm theater. “The Stone Blaster” was set in the midst of a workers union movement. The trip would mark the start of his lifelong relationship with the continent. “There are days full of darkness”, he wrote in The Guardian a year ago, before continuing, “Nevertheless I never have the feeling that I am living on what one might call “borrowed time”. He also wrote many plays.
Mankell leaves a widow Eva Bergman, 70, the daughter of Swedish cinema great Ingmar Bergman, and his son Jon. Together the couple worked on various charities in Africa.
In Mozambique, he ran a theatre company, and devoted time to the battle against Aids, encouraging parents with HIV to record their experiences for their children and for posterity. But after, I think, the third novel, I spoke to this friend of mine and asked what sort of disease I could give him. Only Mankell could have written a novel in which the cyber terrorist who wants to bring down the western banking system turns out to be a benevolent figure whose aim is to wipe out third-world debt.
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Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
