Marklund, Liza

Elisabeth "Liza" Marklund is a successful author and journalist whose crime novels are widely translated and adapted for the screen. She was born the oldest of three children in the village of Pålmark, some 25 kilometres from Piteå in the north of Sweden. She left school at the age of sixteen and moved to Piteå where she worked as a waitress and cleaner. Some years later she travelled around the world, and for a while she worked at a kibbutz in Israel. She had a relationship with Zev Spielman, an American descended from a family that was all but exterminated in the Holocaust. Marklund had just learned that she was pregnant when she was told that she had been admitted to the Kalix High School. Spielman accompanied her to Sweden where their daughter Annika was born in 1983, but her father returned alone to the United States before her first birthday.