29 Facts About Stieg Larsson

Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist.

Stieg Larsson is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack.

For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm.

Stieg Larsson was the second-best-selling fiction author in the world for 2008, owing to the success of the English translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, behind the Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini.

Stieg Larsson was born in Skelleftehamn, Vasterbottens lan, Sweden, the son of Erland Larsson was born on 1935 and and his wife Vivianne, nee Bostrom.

Until the age of nine, Stieg Larsson lived with his grandparents in a small wooden house in the countryside, near the village of Bjursele in Norsjo Municipality, Vasterbotten County.

Stieg Larsson attended the village school and used cross-country skis to get to and from school during the long, snowy winters in northern Sweden, experiences that he remembered fondly.

Stieg Larsson was not as fond of the urban environment in the city Umea, where he resided with his parents after his grandfather, Severin Bostrom, died of a heart attack at age 50.

Stieg Larsson earned a secondary diploma in social sciences in 1972.

Stieg Larsson applied to the Joint Colleges of Journalism in Stockholm, but he failed the entrance examination.

In 1974, Stieg Larsson was drafted into the Swedish Army under the conscription law.

Stieg Larsson spent 16 months in compulsory military service, training as a mortarman in an infantry unit in Kalmar.

On his 12th birthday, Stieg Larsson's parents gave him a typewriter as a birthday gift.

Stieg Larsson became a member of Kommunistiska Arbetareforbundet, edited the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjarde internationalen, journal of the Swedish section of the Fourth International.

Stieg Larsson spent parts of 1977 in Eritrea, training a squad of female Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of mortars.

Stieg Larsson was forced to abandon that work after he contracted a kidney disease.

Stieg Larsson quickly became instrumental in documenting and exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organisations.

Stieg Larsson was an influential debater and lecturer on the subject, reportedly living for years under death threats from his political enemies.

Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack after climbing the stairs to work on 9 November 2004.

Stieg Larsson is interred at the Hogalid Church cemetery in the district of Sodermalm in Stockholm.

In May 2008, it was announced that a 1977 will, found soon after Stieg Larsson's death, declared his wish to leave his assets to the Umea branch of the Communist Workers League.

Stieg Larsson's story was featured on the 10 October 2010 segment of CBS News Sunday Morning.

Stieg Larsson had originally planned a series of 10 books and had completed two and most of a third when he began looking for publishers.

Stieg Larsson's heroine has some similarities with Carol O'Connell's "Mallory", who first appeared in Mallory's Oracle.

Stieg Larsson explained that one of his main recurring characters in the Millennium series, Lisbeth Salander, is actually fashioned on a grown-up Pippi Longstocking as he chose to sketch her.

Stieg Larsson has said when he was 15 years old, he witnessed three of his friends gang-raping a young girl, which led to his lifelong abhorrence of violence and abuse against women.

Stieg Larsson described, in great detail, how the fundamental narratives of his three books were essentially fictionalised portraits of the Sweden few people knew, a place where latent white supremacy found expression in all aspects of contemporary life, and anti-extremists lived in persistent fear of attack.

Stieg Larsson was the first author to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon.

In 2018 a study by Jan Stocklassa of Larsson's research into Palme's assassination was released in Swedish, and in English the following year, translated by Tara F Chace, under the title The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin.