Life and work[edit]
Early life[edit]
Stieg Larsson was born on 15 August 1954, as Karl Stig-Erland Larsson, in Umeå, Västerbottens län, Sweden, where his father and maternal grandfather worked in the Rönnskärsverken smelting plant. Suffering from arsenic poisoning, his father resigned from his job, and the family subsequently moved to Stockholm.
Due to their cramped living conditions there, they chose to let their
one-year-old son, Stieg, remain behind with his grandparents. Stieg
lived with his grandparents until the age of nine, near the village of
Bjursele in Norsjö Municipality, Västerbotten County.[4] Larsson
lived with his grandparents in a small wooden house in the country,
which he loved. He attended the village school and used cross-country
skis to get to and from school during the long, snowy winters in
northern Sweden.
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 of Umeå, where he moved to live with his parents after his grandfather, Severin Boström, died of a heart attack at
age 50. In 1974, Larsson was drafted into the Swedish Army, under the
conscription law, and spent 16 months in compulsory military service,
training as a mortarman in an infantry unit in Kalmar.[5]
His mother Vivianne also died early, in 1991, from complications with breast cancer and an aneurysm.[6]
Writing[edit]
On his twelfth birthday, Larsson's parents gave him a typewriter as a birthday gift.[4]
Larsson's first efforts at writing fiction were not in the genre of crime, but rather science fiction. An avid science fiction reader from an early age, he became active in Swedish science fiction fandom around 1971; co-edited, together with Rune Forsgren, his first fanzine, Sfären, in 1972; and attended his first science fiction convention,
SF•72, in Stockholm. Through the 1970s, Larsson published around 30
additional fanzine issues; after his move to Stockholm in 1977, he
became active in the Scandinavian SF Society ), where he was a board
member in 1978 and 1979, and chairman in 1980.
In his first fanzines, 1972–74, he published a handful of early short
stories, while submitting others to other semi-professional or amateur
magazines. 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 (SFSF). 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.
In early June 2010, manuscripts for two such stories, as well as fanzines with one or two others, were noted in the Swedish National Library (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.[7]
Name change[edit]
Larsson's first name was originally Stig, which is the standard spelling. In his early twenties, he changed it to avoid confusion with his friend Stig Larsson, who would go on to become a well-known author well before Stieg did.[4][8] The pronunciation is the same regardless of spelling.
Activism and journalism[edit]
While working as a photographer, Larsson became engaged in far-left political activism. He became a member of Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers' League),[9] edited the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen, journal of the Swedish section of the Fourth International. He also wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen.[10]
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, having contracted a kidney disease.[11] Upon his return to Sweden, he worked as a graphic designer at the largest Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), between 1977 and 1999.[10]
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."[12] 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. In 1991, his research resulted in his
first book, Extremhögern (The Extreme Right). Larsson
quickly became instrumental in documenting and exposing Swedish extreme
right and racist organizations; he was an influential debater and
lecturer on the subject, reportedly living for years under death threats from his political enemies. The political party Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) was a major subject of his research.[12]
Death and aftermath[edit]
Larsson died on 9 November 2004 in Stockholm, aged 50, of a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office, because the lift was not working.[13] There were rumours that his death was in some way induced, because of death threats he had received as editor of Expo,[14] but these have been denied by Eva Gedin, his Swedish publisher.[15]
Larsson is interred at the Högalid Church cemetery in the district of Södermalm in Stockholm.[citation needed]
In May 2008, it was announced that a 1977 will, found soon after Larsson's death, declared his wish to leave his assets to the Umeå branch of the Communist Workers League (now the Socialist Party).
As the will was unwitnessed, it was not valid under Swedish law, with
the result that all of Larsson's estate, including future royalties from
book sales, went to his father and brother.[16][17] His long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson,[18] who
found the will, has no legal right to the inheritance, sparking
controversy between her and his father and brother. Reportedly, the
couple never married because, under Swedish law, couples entering into
marriage were required to make their addresses (at the time) publicly
available, so marrying would have created a security risk.[19] Owing
to his reporting on extremist groups and the death threats he had
received, the couple had sought and been granted masking of their
addresses, personal data, and identity numbers from
public records, to make it harder for others to trace them; this kind
of "identity cover" was integral to Larsson's work as a journalist and
would have been difficult to bypass if the two had married or become
registered partners.[citation needed]
An article in Vanity Fair magazine
discusses Gabrielsson's dispute with Larsson's relatives, which has
also been well covered in the Swedish press. She claims the author had
little contact with his father and brother, and requests the rights to
control his work so it may be presented in the way he would have wanted.[20][21] Larsson's story was featured on the 10 October 2010 segment of CBS News Sunday Morning. In this segment, Larsson's family claims that the fourth book, published in August 2015, is actually the fifth book.[22]
No comments:
Post a Comment