The Steel Spring

Born in 1926, Per Wahloo was a Swedish writer and journalist who, alongside his own novels, collaborated with his wife, Maj Sjowall, on the bestselling Martin Beck crime series which are credited as inspiring writers as varied as Agatha Christie, Henning Mankell and Jonathan Franzen. In 1971 the fourth novel in the series, The Laughing Policeman, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Per Wahloo died in 1975. Sarah Death has translated the work of many Swedish authors from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, including Alexander Ahndoril, Steve Sem-Sandberg and Carl-Johan Vallgren, and Norwegian Linn Ullman (A Blessed Child was named Translated Novel of the Year by the Independent). She has twice won the triennial George Bernard Shaw Prize, for Kerstin Ekman's The Angel House, and Ellen Mattson's Snow. In 2008 she was awarded the Swedish Academy's Translation Prize.