Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser (born 21 February 1950) is a Swedish author and teacher who mainly writes 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 (a psychiatrist) moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A few years later, they moved to London since it was easier for his wife to find work there. They now live in Furillen on the island Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

Criminal conviction On June 14, 2024, Håkan Nesser was sentenced by the Svea Court of Appeal to one year and six months in prison for three counts of aggravated tax evasion. In February 2025, the Supreme Court of Sweden decided to reject Nesser's request for leave to appeal. The crime had come to the attention of the judicial system thanks to the Paradise Papers.

Characters and themes A recurring main character is named 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 named 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 ("Human without Dog") 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 (which became The Living and the Dead in Winsford) would take place in the "county of Somerset".