Now in his mid-fifties, he has produced dozens of plays and between 30 and 40 books. He slides back in his chair with his morning beer and doesn't smile, but frowns, intense, even sombre.Īll his life, Mankell has written.
His shirt is creased and his face pouched and rumpled. He's been up since dawn and it took him three jammed hours to get into London from Heathrow. The day I meet him, Mankell is in Scandinavian mode. Some things you can only see at a distance.' I am like an artist who must stand close to the canvas to paint, but then stand back to see what he has painted. It isn't a double life, but a 'complete one. He has 'one foot in the sand and the other in the snow'. Now Mankell lives half the year in Sweden, writing novels set in the weather of his native land, and half the year in Mozambique, where he is the head of Teatro Avenida in Maputo. It was the end of the journey of a young child, the beginning of another kind of journey.' Of course, I found out that there is no end of the world. I wanted to find out what is behind the wood, behind the mountain. And so I always wanted to go there, as if I had a genetic memory of being a nomad. Africa was the strangest place I could imagine. The logs that were sent down that river were crocodiles. 'I grew up near a river and for me it was the Congo. But Mankell sets against these first Scandinavian memories his first dreams.