Fredrik Backman is a Swedish author, born near Stockholm in 1981, who has become one of the world's best-loved contemporary novelists on the strength of his warm, wry, big-hearted fiction.
A former columnist and blogger, he turned to novels in 2012 with A Man Called Ove, the story of a curmudgeonly, grief-stricken widower whose prickly exterior slowly gives way under the persistent kindness of his neighbours. An international sensation, it spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was twice filmed - in Sweden and, as A Man Called Otto, in Hollywood.
He has since written a string of tender, humane bestsellers about ordinary people and the communities that hold them together - the multigenerational My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, the ensemble comedy Anxious People, and the searching Beartown trilogy, which uses a small hockey-obsessed town to examine loyalty, violence and belonging. His books are number-one bestsellers in Sweden and are published in more than twenty-five languages.
Funny and unashamedly emotional, he writes stories that find profound feeling in small lives.
