Inspector-Wallander.org News Archive

Inspector-Wallander.org
The Site for English-Speaking Fans of Henning Mankell's Detective Series
Featuring Kurt Wallander of Ystad, Sweden,
A small town outside of Malmö in the southern province of Skåne.

News Archive

Mankell mentioned in soccer article, travel tips

Posted 9 February 2006

Here's a small collection of articles that mention Henning Mankell.

DW-World.de, the English-language web site of the German international broadcasting service Deutsche Welle, published an article covering a cultural symposium tied to the 2006 World Cup. Titled From the Pen to the Pitch: World Literature Meets Soccer, the article covers internationally known authors who were invited to Berlin in order to discuss how "International Literature Meets International Soccer".

The article gives Henning Mankell's views as:

For Swedish superstar author Henning Mankell, soccer shares with literature the ability to tell a story.

He recounted a game he saw in Mozambique that changed his view of the game forever. It was 15 years ago at the conclusion of a brutal civil war there. One attempt to get the two sides of the conflict to reconcile was to arrange a soccer match between two teams of men who had committed atrocities in the war.

As Mankell watched these men play, he said they began to see each other differently than they had before, realizing they could solve their conflicts in a way that did not involve violence.

"Drama, literature and soccer are about the same thing, conflict, contradictions and finally, solving problems," Mankell said. "That's what the author has to do, and the soccer player does as well. And both have to make it interesting, otherwise no one will watch the game and no one will read the book."

You can read the full article by Kyle James by visting the DW-World.de website.

Mankell received a quick mention in Arthur Frommer's list of new year's resolutions, which was widely published in the travel section of many US newspapers:

10. For hotels and airport waiting-room reading, I will stock up on mystery novels by Donna Leon (writing about detective/inspector Guido Brunetti of Venice) or Henning Mankell (writing about Inspector Kurt Wallander of Sweden). Both of them are as good as guidebooks in alerting you to the national attitudes and lifestyles of Italy and Sweden.

Mankell's also gets the occasional mention in magazines about cars, usually whenever test driving a new model takes the authors to Sweden. If you come across any interesting stories that you think would be of interest to other readers, please send them in.