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| Henning Mankell wrote about being diagnosed with cancer in his book Quicksand: What It Means to be a Human Being. Photograph: Reuters |
Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer best known for the Wallander crime novels, has died at the age of 67.
Mankell was diagnosed with cancer in January 2014 and dealt with the experience in his book Quicksand: What It Means to be a Human Being.
“He passed away quietly last night in the wake of disease,” his publisher said on its website on Monday morning.
Mankell was the author of around 40 novels – 11 of which starred his best known character, the Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander – and had sold more than 40 million copies of his books around the world, in more than 40 languages. Leopard, the publisher he founded in 2001 with Dan Israel, and which published his books, described him as “one of the great Swedish authors of our time”.
“For Henning, writing was his lifeblood,” publisher and longtime friend Dan Israel told Dagens Nyheter. “He had plans to write a new Wallander in time for the 25th anniversary next year, he had several ideas. He saw enough in front of him that he would fight a long time. He was most afraid of not being able to write... He wrote two books during their disease and I think they are brilliant books.”
He was born in Stockholm, the son of a lawyer. After his mother abandoned the family when he was a year old, his father moved the family to the small down of Sveg, where they lived above the courthouse until Mankell was 13. He dropped out of secondary school to travel first to Paris, and then to sea, where he worked on a freighter. In 1966 he returned to Paris, becoming active in the student politics, but returned to work as a stagehand in Stockholm. There he wrote his first play, about Swedish colonialism. In 1973, he published a novel about the Swedish Labour movement.
Wallander, who featured in a series of novels published between 1991 and 2009, was portrayed on screen by Rolf Lassgård in a series of Swedish films, and in Swedish and UK TV adaptations starring Krister Henriksson and Kenneth Branagh, respectively.
The Orwell prize-wining writer and journalist Andrew Brown wrote in a Guardian obituary: “He established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia. He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world.”
Mankell also wrote plays, and was the artistic leader of Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, setting his young adult novel Secrets in the Fire in the country, and basing it on the true story of the land mine survivor Sofia Alface. He worked extensively with Aids charities in Africa, and, in 2010, was on board the aid flotilla bound for Gaza which was boarded by Israeli troops.
“Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end,” said Leopard in a statement this morning.
In 2008, Mankell was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of St Andrews “in recognition of his major contribution to literature and to the practical exercise of conscience”.
After being diagnosed with cancer in 2014, he wrote a column about his experience of the disease for the Guardian, describing the period after he was diagnosed as a “10-day-long descent into hell”.
In his final column, written in September, he pointed to a comment made by the writer Per-Olof Enquist: “’One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.’ If I add to that a quotation I read in a repair workshop when my car was in for an oil change, the picture becomes even more clear. It said: ‘Don’t take life too seriously. You won’t come out of it alive no matter what.’”
In an interview in the Göteborgs Posten late last month, Mankell told Ingrid Norrman that “I might work for two hours a day. … I use the hours I have the energy to write, but it is clear that I do not do as much now as I did before”, adding that he was working on a new book. The idea, he said, came last summer when he was admitted to Sahlgrenska hospital to be treated for a lung inflammation.
“I got the idea in midsummer when I was at the doctor to take a blood test and instead ended up in an ambulance. It turned out that I had double pneumonia, the immune system was completely beaten. I was inside for ten days at the hospital, slept pretty bad, and heard in my confused state of people talking in the corridor. … I realized that it was the night nurse they were talking about, but there was something magical about those vague voices talking about the night. So I got in touch with a night nurse, interviewed her and now I am writing a novel about a night nurse from early evening to the time she goes home in the morning. It will be a book about all these nurses walk alone around the hospital wards at night and taking care of patients,” he said.
The novelist said in the interview that when he was young, “the only thing I was afraid of was getting old and turning around and seeing that I botched my life. But I’m happy with the life that has been.”
“I have always made my choices and lived despite them, whether they were right or wrong. I have never been like a dry leaf that someone threw into the stream and which randomly ends up anywhere downstream. I dare to turn around now and looking back, because I see that I have not botched my life. The unique thing about life is that you must account for the choices you make. You can never take a step back and redo it. It does not mean that I’m finished. Death, when it comes, interferes always in the living things that are going on,” he said.
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