(photo: Lina Ikse Bergman)

Biography:

Snow, deep snow, is one of Henning Mankell's first memories, and later in life, after choosing to divide his time between Moçambique and Sweden, Henning states: - I stand with one foot in the snow and one foot in the sand.

Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm on the 3rd of February 1948. At the age of six his grandmother taught him to read and write and for Henning Mankell that was a profound experience.

- I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing that I a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I

became an author.

Henning Mankell was soon bored with secondary school and left at the age of 16 to work as a merchant seaman. He worked for two years as a stevedore on a Swedish ship ferrying coal and iron ore to Europe and America.After having signed off Henning Mankell settled in Paris in 1966. He stayed there for a year and a half in a constant shortage of money, although he experienced the activism and political debate. Thereafter he went to Stockholm to work as a stagehand.

While working as a stagehand he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park, about Swedish colonial interests in the 19th century's South America.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.

- I don't know why but when I got off the plane in Africa, I had a curious feeling of coming home.

Since then Henning Mankell has spent a great part of his life on the African continent. After living in Zambia and other countries, he was invited in 1986 to run the Teatro Avenida in the capital of Mocambique, Maputo. Since his arrival in 1986 he is spending at least half the year in Maputo working with the theatre and writing. Living and working in Africa, has given Henning Mankell another perspective on Sweden and Europe.

The Teatro Avenida has since the beginning been concerned with the political and social issues that are topical in Mocambique.From the early 1970's Henning Mankell has divided his time between writing novels and directing at various theatres. His ambition to expose the lack of equality in society has also been the same, regardless of artistic expression and context.In 1979 Henning Mankell published his first novel for the publishing house Ordfront, The Prison Colony that Disappeared. This is also where he met his editor and good friend Dan Israel.

However, in 2001, after more than 20 years with the publishing house, Henning Mankell and Dan Israel left Ordfront to start a publishing house of their own, Leopard Publishing House.In the beginning of the 1980's Ordfront published one novel a year by Henning Mankell, among them the novel Daisy Sisters, released in 1982.

This novel has meant very much to Henning Mankell. It is a story about two generations of working women in the era after the Second World War. In 1984 Henning Mankell became the head of Kronobergsteatern in Växjö, Sweden, in which he introduced a new view of what to perform. He wanted to produce only Swedish plays, which turned out to be a success. His work at the theatre resulted in him not publishing anything between 1984 and 1990.

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. A Bridge to the Stars won the prestigious Rabén & Sjögren award for best children book that year. The year after the first novel in the series about the detective Kurt Wallander, Faceless Killers, was released.The novel was an immediate national success claiming several awards.

However, it was not until the third book about Wallander, The White Lioness, that the series about the detective from Ystad became the international bestseller it is today.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.

In 1995, in addition to the Wallander mystery Sidetracked, Henning Mankell released two other novels. One of them, Secrets in the Fire, was the first part of the trilogy about the African girl Sofia, the girl who lost her legs when she accidentally stepped on a landmine.In 2007 Henning Mankell completed his trilogy about Sofia with the novel Eldens vrede (which is published the United Kingdom in July 2009). The second part, Playing with Fire came in 2001, and the first part, Secrets in the Fire, came in 1995. All the books about Sofia separately adresses issues close to Henning Mankell's heart. In the first one it is landmines, in the second one AIDS and in the last one Sofia has grown to become a young woman and mother of two children and struggles to make ends meet.The books about Sofia have been a great success and are read by school children all over the world, raising awareness of some of the problems that the people in Africa are facing in their daily struggle for survival. Since he came to Africa Henning Mankell has been passionately dedicated to resolving the problems tearing the continent apart. He is especially committed to the fight against AIDS and devotes much of his spare time to his "memory books" project, which aims to raise awareness of the catastrophe. Parents dying with AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories in words and pictures, but not just for the children they leave behind, but also as a human chronicle-

Maybe in 500 years these "memory books" will be a great record of African times. My hope is to store them in the new Alexandrian library in Egypt.

In 2003 Henning Mankell published a book entitled I Die, But My Memory Lives On which he hoped would raise awareness of AIDS in the West. The foreword of the book is written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.Henning Mankell's tenacity to African issues resulted in him being invited by the Federal President of Germany Horst Köhler in 2005 to join his initiative Partnership with Africa. Among the other participants were the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, and Ghana's President, John A. Kuffour.In October 2007 Henning Mankell and his wife since 1998 Eva Bergman, a Swedish theater director, donated money to the Swedish welfare organization SOS Children's Villages to fund the construction of three villages in Mocambique for orphans.

The money will be used to build 15 houses which will become the home for 150 childrenAlso, Africa has had a great influence on his work. His award winning novel The Chronicler of the Winds (1995) is set there, and is deeply influenced by traditional African storytelling. On the rooftop of a theatre in an African port, a ten-year-old boy lies, slowly dying of bullet wounds and on that roof top he tells his story.

Furthermore, half the Wallander mysteries were written there.Henning Mankell's Wallander is not only a literary success; in 2008 BBC adapted three of the Wallander stories into 90-minute episodes for TV, starring Kenneth Branagh as Wallander. The three novels are; One Step Behind, Firewall and Sidetracked.After Henning Mankell completed the Wallander-series in 1999 he has written twelve novels and a number of plays. In 2004 Depths was published, a lyrical and evocative novel about a Swedish naval engineer during World War I and his devastating plunge into obsession. In 2008 Mankell released a new thriller, The Chinese. It was published in seven countries simultaneously and apart from being a crime story it also discusses the tremendous transformation undergone by China in the last twenty years and the repercussions this has and will have domestically as well as globally.Henning Mankell was in June 2008 given an honorary doctorate at St Andrews UniversityThis year, Henning Mankell received the honor to sit in the jury of the Berlin Film Festival, Berlinale 2009. The jury consists of several of the film industry's most significant personalities.

Furthermore, Henning Mankell is currently working on a play about the British biologist Charles Darwin and his journey with the ship the Beagle. He also just had première with August Strindberg's Miss Julie at Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Moçambique.