Fredrik Backman

Biography

Fredrik Backman (born 1981) is a Swedish blogger, columnist, and author who began writing A Man Called Ove as a blog post in 2012 about a fictional old man in his neighborhood. The post went viral in Sweden, became a full novel, and was translated into over 40 languages. It spent years on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a Swedish film (2015, Academy Award nominee) and an American film starring Tom Hanks (2022). Backman has described Ove as based partly on his own father and grandfather — men who expressed love through competence and found emotional vocabulary difficult.

Fredrik Backman at a glance