Håkan Nesser


Håkan Nesser 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.

Early life

Håkan Nesser was born and grew up in Kumla, Örebro County. His first novel was published in 1988. He worked as a teacher in Uppsala until 1998 when he became a full-time author. In August 2006, Håkan Nesser and his wife Elke moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A few years later the couple moved to London since it was easier for his wife to find work there. Having returned to Sweden, they now live in Stockholm and on the island Furillen in the Baltic Sea.

Characters and themes

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 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.
In August 2011 he hinted on his own site that a future book would take place in the "county of Somerset".

Inspector Van Veeteren">Van Veeteren">Inspector Van Veeteren