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Sweden´s Queen of Detective Stories

Liza Marklund is one of Sweden´s greatest writers. Her bestseller "The Bomber" has become a great success, and it has been translated into several languages. Now you´re about to know a little more about "The Bomber" and the life of Liza Marklund

Childhood
Liza Marklund is 40 years old. She was born in a little village in Sweden. As a kid she loved mysterybooks and she´s been writing books since the day she learned to write. She used to sit in the playhouse and write in her dad´s checked pad. Already then the heroine in her books were named Annika.

Family and friends
Right now she´s living together with her three children and a man, who she´s not married to. They have been engaged for more than eleven years. She say that they haven´t had the time for marriage. Liza´s friends are very important to her. She calls them and they call her several times a day. Liza Marklund cries all the time, hardly ever drinks and she believes in God. She´s allergic to fruit, spices, flour, some vegetables, etc. and she´s got asthma and hay-fever. She´s been having these problems for only 4-5 years.

Working life
She has been working for a couple of newspapers in Sweden. In 1997 she quit her job to write "The Bomber", which became a huge success. Today Liza Marklund has been selling 1.2 million books and she has been translated into 15 languages. She has written five books, but so far , only "The Bomber" and "Studio Sex" have been translated into English. When she writes a new book, she just all of a sudden comes up with an idea that she writes down. Often it comes from something she sees and she feels right away that "this is a book". Every book has taken about five months’ to write when she is done with most of the research and planning. At the same time as she writes her books, she writes alot of other things, for example, articles and short stories. Liza Marklund has been threatened to life because of articles she has written and her address has since a long time been a secret to the people. In one of her books she writes about people that have been threatened to life.

Annika Bengtzon
In four of her books she writes about the journalist Annika Bengtzon. Liza Marklund herself say she wanted to create a person she and her friends could identify with. A person that works too much, eats too little and the wrong food, has kids in the daycare centre and is suffering from stress. Except from how they work, Annika and Liza have nothing in common.

The Bomber
"The Bomber" is Liza Marklund´s most successful book, it was released in 1998. "The Bomber" was the first book to be written in the "Annika Bengtzon- serie", but according to the contents in the books, "The Bomber" is number three of four. "The Bomber" is about Annika Bengtzon, a journalist and mother of two children. She´s married to Anders and the family lives in an apartment in Stockholm. Annika is working at a newspaper and she has to balance between being a wife and mother and being a journalist at the newspaper. Stockholm has a new arena for the Olympic Games, and when that arena gets blown up, Annika starts looking for the bomber. More sport arenas get blasted away and Annika is getting closer and closer to the truth without even knowing it. She actually gets herself in real danger.

Good reading
It´s a really good book. You can´t stop reading, you just have to know how it ends. Liza Marklund really shows that she´s a good writer. You actually find out how it is being a journalist, a mum and a wife at the same time. I guess a lot of people can recognize themselves in this book. I really recommend you yo read "The Bomber" by Liza Marklund

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Writers: Carina Höglander (sp04-42@park.se)
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