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VJ Books presents Henning Mankell!
 Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm on the 3rd of February 1948. When Henning was barely two years old his father, Ivar Mankell, was offered to serve as a court judge in a small town in the north of Sweden called Sveg, where Henning spent his childhood. In many ways Sveg was a wonderful place to grow up in and today Henning Mankell looks back on the dark winter days as among the happiest of his life.
Ivar Mankell raised his children himself and he always encouraged them to read, but he never told them what to read. So Henning Mankell read a lot about the African explorers and imagined that the logs in Ljusnan, the river that runs through Sveg, were crocodiles in the Congo. Growing up in a flat above the law courts it was almost inevitable that Henning Mankell would be interested in the justice system and how it works.
In 1972, shortly after his father died, Henning Mankell's first novel The Stone Blaster was released. It tells the story of the workers' union movement and is still in print in Sweden. It is about an old man looking back on his life and on Swedish society and the need for solidarity, a theme that is frequently recurring in Henning Mankell's works and in his life.
Having published his first novel Henning Mankell emasculated his dream of going to Africa and arrived in Guinea-Bissau the same year as The Stone Blaster was published. Since then Henning Mankell has spent a great part of his life on the African continent.
In 1979 Henning Mankell published his first novel for the publishing house Ordfront, The Prison Colony that Disappeared. In 1990 Henning Mankell made an effective comeback, publishing two books in the same year, The Eye of the Leopard, a haunting novel juxtaposing a man's coming-of-age in Sweden with his life in Zambia, and the first book in the series about Joel, A bridge to the Stars. The year after, the first novel in the series about the detective Kurt Wallander, Faceless Killers, was released.
While the Wallander-series gained international interest Henning Mankell kept writing other novels as well. In 1991 the second book in his series about Joel was released, Shadows in Twilight. In the years following 1991 Henning Mankell published one Wallander-detective story each year.
As the Wallander-series was published in more and more countries, Henning Mankell also became a more public figure. However, it was not until recently that Henning Mankell became more familiar to the public than his fictious creation, Kurt Wallander. Nevertheless, Henning Mankell is not sure they would get along that well. The nine Wallander stories are set in the small town Ystad in the county of Skåne on the southernmost tip of Sweden. Henning Mankell lived there himself in the 1980's and still owns a farm outside the town. After Henning Mankell completed the Wallander-series in 1999 he has written twelve novels and a number of plays.
Mankell's novel The Man from Beijing was released in the US, the UK and Canada in the end of February 2010. Henning Mankell is currently working on a new novel which will be released in Sweden in 2011 as well as writing a tv series about his late father in law Ingmar Bergman. Moreover, his last novel about Kurt Wallander, The Troubled Man, will be released in the US, Uk and Canada in the end of March 2011.
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Henning Mankell Bibliography:
Kurt Wallander Series
1. Faceless Killers (1991)
2. The Dogs of Riga (1992)
3. The White Lioness (1993)
4. The Man Who Smiled (2005)
5. Sidetracked (1995)
6. The Fifth Woman (1996)
7. One Step Behind (1997)
8. Firewall (1998)
9. The Pyramid (2008)
10. The Troubled Man (2011)
Sofia Series
1. Secrets in the Fire (2000)
2. Playing with Fire (2000)
3. The Fury in the Fire (2009)
Linda Wallander Series
1. Before the Frost (2004)
Joel Gustafson Series
1. A Bridge to the Stars (2005)
2. Shadows in Twilight (2007)
3. When the Snow Fell (2007)
4. The Journey to the End of the World (2008)
Other Novels
The Return of the Dancing Master (2003)
Crusader's Cross (2005)
Chronicler of the Winds (2006)
Depths (2006)
The Eye of the Leopard (2007)
Kennedy's Brain (2007)
The Cat Who Liked Rain (2008)
Italian Shoes (2009)
Shadow of the Leopard (2009)
The Man from Beijing (2010)
Daniel (2010)
Collections
Because I'm a Girl (2009) (with Tim Butcher, Joanne Harris, Kathy Lette, Deborah Moggach, Marie Phillips, Irvine Welsh and Xiaolu Guo)
Non fiction
I Die, But the Memory Lives on (2004)
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