David Lagercrantz

David Lagercrantz (born 4 September 1962 in Solna) is a Swedish journalist and bestselling writer. He is best known internationally for continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, though his reputation at home also rests on biographies and crime fiction written in Swedish.

He grew up in Solna, now part of greater Stockholm, in a family steeped in letters: his father, Olof Lagercrantz, was an author and editor, and his mother, Martina Ruin, was the daughter of the philosopher Hans Ruin. His sister is the actress Marika Lagercrantz. After studying philosophy and religious history and training in journalism in Gothenburg, he began as a crime reporter at the regional paper Sundsvalls Tidning before moving to the evening paper Expressen, where he covered many of the major criminal cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That period shaped him, and it later gave rise to his book The Angels in Åmsele, about a triple murder in a small northern Swedish town.

His first books were biographies of unusual figures, among them the adventurer Göran Kropp and the inventor Håkan Lans, followed by a novel about the mathematician Alan Turing, Fall of Man in Wilmslow (2009), which became his literary breakthrough. His greatest commercial success came with I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović (2011), a sports biography that sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Sweden within weeks and drew many young readers. In 2015 he published The Girl in the Spider's Web, the fourth Millennium novel, which appeared in 27 countries at once. Two further installments followed, and later he launched the Rekke-Vargas series with Obscuritas (2021).

His legacy lies in combining wide commercial appeal with public engagement: he supports youth reading, sits on the board of Swedish PEN, and has backed organisations training investigative journalists.