Henning Mankell, the Swedish author who created detective Kurt Wallander, has died at the age of 67, according to multiple reports. The news was confirmed on the author’s website. Mankell was diagnosed with cancer in 2014.
Fans of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series should be familiar the work of Mankell, who was described by the New York Public Library as “probably the brightest star in the Scandinoir universe.”
Wallander was played in Britain by Kenneth Branagh in a BBC series. The character has also been brought to the screen in a Swedish television series and a Swedish film series. Branagh has called the character "an open wound."
“In life and in art, Henning Mankell was a man of passionate commitment,” Branagh said in a statement, according to the BBC. “I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity. Aside from his stringent political activism, and his decades of work in Africa, he also leaves an immense contribution to Scandinavian literature.”
Mankell was also a dramatist, acting as an artistic leader of Teatro Avenida in Mozambique.
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