John Ajvide Lindqvist

John Ajvide Lindqvist was born John Erik Lindqvist on 2 December 1968 and grew up in Blackeberg, a working-class suburb on the western edge of Stockholm, where his mother worked in a lunch restaurant and delivered newspapers. Horror was the first thing he chose to read for himself, at thirteen, and he spent his teens devouring horror novels and films, Stephen King among them. He was a magician first, good enough to take second place in the Nordic card trick championship, and at nineteen he moved into stand-up comedy, which he performed for some twelve years before turning to writing material for other comedians and scripts for Swedish television, including the sketch series Reuter & Skoog and the drama Kommissionen. His first novel, Låt den rätte komma in, set a vampire in the Blackeberg of the early 1980s and took its title from the Morrissey song Let the Right One Slip In. Ordfront published it in 2004 and it became a bestseller, and as Let the Right One In, in Ebba Segerberg's translation of 2007, it carried his name abroad. He wrote the screenplay himself for Tomas Alfredson's film of 2008, which won him the Guldbagge Award for best screenplay, and the novel was filmed again in Hollywood as Let Me In in 2010. A zombie novel, Handling the Undead, followed in 2005, then Harbour, Little Star and the Platserna trilogy that began with Himmelstrand in 2014. He won the Selma Lagerlöf Prize in 2008, and his short story Border became Ali Abbasi's film of 2018, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes. He is married to the poet Mia Ajvide, with whom he shares the name Ajvide, and they live in Norrtälje Municipality, north of Stockholm.

Before Let the Right One In, Lindqvist tried other kinds of fiction and struggled terribly with the language. Then he turned back to horror, the genre he had loved since he was thirteen, and found himself thinking, "Good lord, this is EASY!" A long run of Swedish publishers still turned the manuscript down before Ordfront took it.