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 was born and grew up in Kumla, Örebro County; he has lived most of his adult life in Uppsala. His first novel was published in 1988, but he worked as a teacher until 1998 when he became a full-time author. In August 2006, Håkan Nesser and his wife Elke (a psychiatrist) moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A few years later the couple packed their bags and moved to London since it was easier for his wife to find work there. When in Sweden, Nesser lives on the Gotlandic island of Furillen in the Baltic Sea.

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.

...
Wikipedia