The Butcher of Little Burma

Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser (Kumla, 1950) is one of the most popular Swedish authors worldwide. He lives alternately in Stockholm and on the island of Gotland. His detective stories are extremely successful not only in his native Sweden. Some of them have been made into films. He is able to switch genres with elegance, but his greatest success has come from a series of crime stories starring Inspectors Van Veeteren and Gunnar Barbarotti. Håkan Nesser's books have been translated into more than 25 languages and sold more than 13 million copies. They guarantee the best quality in the crime genre, but also sleepless nights when you just can't put the book down. His handwriting is unmistakable. He has managed to create extraordinarily vivid characters of Detective Van Veeteren and Inspector Barbarotti, who move in a precisely depicted environment inspired mainly by Swedish, Dutch, German and Polish realities. Håkan Nesser used to be a full-time teacher, his first book was published in 1988 (the novel Koreografen), yet he was still behind the desk for another ten years before he decided to become a full-time writer. In 1993, the first story of Chief Inspector Van Veeteren of Maardam was published. For his crime stories with the aforementioned hero, which have been published in more than 20 countries with 10 million copies sold, he has won a number of prestigious awards, including the European Crime Fiction Star Award, the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize (the only author to have won this prize three times so far), the Danish Rosenkrantz-prisen (the only author to have won this prize twice so far) and the Scandinavian Glass Key Award. After nineteen years and ten books with Inspector Van Veeteren, Nesser (2012) published the first story introducing a new crime series - this time starring Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, who lives in the town of Kymlinge in the south of Sweden. Barbarotti's series has sold over 2 million books in 10 countries. Among Nesser's other well-received works are: novels A Summer with Kim Novak and The Shadows and The Rain, philosophical thriller The Fly and The Eternity, epistolary novel Dear Agnes! and many other works.