Fredrik Backman

Fredrik Backman was born on June 2, 1981, in Brännkyrka, a district in southern Stockholm, and grew up in Helsingborg in southern Sweden. Before the novels, he built a following as a blogger and columnist, writing for the newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad and the men's magazine Moore Magazine. That is where he sharpened the voice that became his trademark: short sentences, a quick joke and then a punch to the gut.

His debut came in 2012 with A Man Called Ove. The premise: a grumpy, rule-obsessed widower has his routine turned upside down when a noisy family moves in next door. The book hit number one in Sweden and, after its 2013 English release, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. U.S. publisher Atria bought the rights to his next books.

Next came My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (2013), about a seven-year-old girl and her eccentric grandmother, and Britt-Marie Was Here (2014), which hands the lead to a side character from the previous book. Around the same time he published Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, which he called a dysfunctional parenting guide, drawn from his own experience as a father.

With Beartown (2016) the mood got heavier. The small, frozen town lives for its junior hockey team, and one event changes everything on the eve of a big tournament. The story continued in Us Against You (2017) and wrapped up in The Winners (2021). In between came Anxious People (2019), a comedy about a robbery that turns into a hostage situation at an apartment viewing.

The screen found Backman early. The Swedish film A Man Called Ove (2015), directed by Hannes Holm and starring Rolf Lassgård, earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Makeup. Hollywood remade it as A Man Called Otto (2022), starring Tom Hanks. Beartown became a TV series in 2020, and Anxious People got a Swedish series on Netflix.

In 2025 he released My Friends, about a teenage girl who is handed a famous painting and travels across the country to meet the childhood friends it shows. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction. Backman has been married to Neda Shafti Backman since 2009 and has two children.