After The Fire

Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948 and died in 2015 in Gothenburg. For a long time he was a playwright and theatre director, namely at Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique. Since 1990, he has devoted his literary work to police officers headed by Kurt Wallander. With this character he sought to recreate an "old-fashioned" policeman who tries, at all costs, to fight against a modern Sweden in which racist ideas and extreme violence prevail. Through a unique blend of American Noir and the existential melancholy common to Europeans, Mankell describes a world where crime is solved through pure inspiration or simple drudgery, and where the specter of our own mortality is an intrinsic and unavoidable condition for each of us.