David Lagercrantz

David Lagercrantz (born 4 September 1962) is a Swedish journalist and author, internationally known as the author of I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye and The Girl Who Lived Twice. The latter three of these works are the fourth, fifth and sixth instalments respectively in the Millennium series originated by Stieg Larsson. He is also a television presenter and a screenwriter. David Lagercrantz is the youngest of five siblings. His father was author and editor-in-chief Olof Lagercrantz (1911–2002), whose parents were banker Carl Lagercrantz and Countess Agnes Hamilton; the latter was the great-granddaughter of poet and historian Erik Gustaf Geijer. David Lagercrantz's mother, Finnish-Swedish Martina Ruin (1921–2019), was the daughter of the philosopher and author Hans Ruin. The actress Marika Lagercrantz is David Lagercrantz's sister.

In interviews, David Lagercrantz has spoken of his fear of failure in an intellectually eminent family, of early depression, and of the strained relationship with his father. After graduating from high school in Stockholm David Lagercrantz studied philosophy and religious history, and obtained a degree in journalism from Gothenburg University. Enticed by a peculiar job advertisement, he took a position as a crime reporter at local newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning, and subsequently worked at evening paper Expressen, where he covered the major criminal cases of the time, one of which he later described in his book Änglarna i Åmsele (The Angels in Åmsele). Though his time as a crime reporter was formative in many ways, he eventually had enough and moved into freelance journalism.In 1996, Lagercrantz wrote a piece about the adventurer Göran Kropp who, mere days after a disaster on Mount Everest in which eight people died, reached the summit without sherpa or oxygen. The piece turned into Lagercrantz's first book, Göran Kropp 8000 Plus (1997). In 2000, Lagercrantz published a biography of the inventor Håkan Lans, A Swedish Genius, which was later adapted as a documentary film, Patent 986. Lagercrantz's literary breakthrough was the 2009 novel Syndafall i Wilmslow (the Fall of Man in Wilmslow) about the English mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Lagercrantz's first books had in common the theme of brilliant eccentrics at odds with their contemporaries.