Early Life
Stieg Larsson was born in Skelleftehamn near the northern Swedish city of Skellefteå, where his father and maternal grandfather worked in the Rönnskärsverken smelting plant. Owing to his suffering from arsenic poisoning, his father had to leave his job. The family subsequently moved to Stockholm, but, because of their cramped living conditions there, they chose to let their one-year-old son remain behind with his grandparents. He lived with his grandparents until the age of nine near the village of Bjursele in Norsjö Municipality, Västerbotten County.
In the book "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (Seven Stories Press, June 2011), Eva Gabrielsson describes this as Larsson's motivation for setting part of his first novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in northern Sweden, which Gabrielsson calls "godforsaken places at the back of beyond." Larsson lived with his grandparents in a small wooden house in the country, which he loved. He attended the village school and used cross-country skis to get to and from school during the long, snowy winters in northern Sweden. However, he was not as fond of the urban environment in the city of Umeå, where he moved to live with his parents after his grandfather, Severin Boström, died of a heart attack at age 50. His mother Vivianne also died early, in 1991, from complications with breast cancer and an aneurysm.
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