Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson was born in Skelleftehamn, Västerbottens län, Sweden, the son of Erland Larsson (born 1935) and his wife Vivianne, née Boström (1937–1991).

His father and maternal grandfather worked in the Rönnskärsverken smelting plant in Skelleftehamn.

Suffering from arsenic poisoning, his father resigned from his job, and the family subsequently moved to Stockholm.

However, because of their cramped living conditions, they chose to let one-year-old Larsson remain behind.

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

He 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.

In the book "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me, Eva Gabrielsson describes this as Larsson's motivation for setting part of his first novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in northern Sweden, which Gabrielsson calls "godforsaken places at the back of beyond."

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

Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson (, ; 15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist.

Through the 1970s, Larsson published around 30 additional fanzine issues; after his move to Stockholm in 1971, he became active in the Scandinavian SF Society, of which he was a board member in 1978 and 1979, and chairman in 1980.

As an avid science fiction reader from an early age, he became active in Swedish science-fiction fandom around 1971; he co-edited, with Rune Forsgren, his first fanzine, Sfären, in 1972; and he attended his first science-fiction convention, SF•72, in Stockholm.

Larsson earned a secondary diploma in social sciences in 1972.

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

In his first fanzines, 1972–74, he published a handful of early short stories, while submitting others to other semiprofessional or amateur magazines.

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

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

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

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

Upon his return to Sweden, he worked as a graphic designer at the largest Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, between 1977 and 1999.

Larsson's political convictions, as well as his journalistic experiences, led him to found the Swedish Expo Foundation, similar to the British Searchlight Foundation, established to "counteract the growth of the extreme right and the white power culture in schools and among young people."

He was co-editor or editor of several science-fiction fanzines, including Sfären and FIJAGH!; in 1978–79, he was president of the largest Swedish science-fiction fan club, Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction.

His mother Vivianne also died early, in 1991, from complications of breast cancer and an aneurysm.

He also became the editor of the foundation's magazine, Expo, in 1995.

When he was not at his day job, he worked on independent research into right-wing extremism in Sweden.

He 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.

The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only).

The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels.

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

His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.

He 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.

The third and final novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, became the bestselling book in the United States in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly.

In early June 2010, manuscripts for two such stories, as well as fanzines with one or two others, were noted in the National Library of Sweden (to which this material had been donated a few years earlier, mainly by the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation, which works to further science-fiction fandom in Sweden).

This discovery of what was called "unknown" works by Larsson generated considerable publicity.

While working as a photographer, Larsson became engaged in far-left political activism.

He became a member of Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers' League), edited the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen, journal of the Swedish section of the Fourth International.

He wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen.

An account of this period in Larsson's life, along with detailed information on his fanzine writing and short stories, is included in the biographical essays written by Larsson's friend John-Henri Holmberg in The Tattooed Girl, by Holmberg with Dan Burstein and Arne De Keijzer, 2011.

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

Larsson's first efforts at writing fiction were in the genre of science fiction.

By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide.