Søren Sveistrup

Danish screenwriter and novelist who created the acclaimed television series The Killing before writing his debut thriller novel The Chestnut Man.

Søren Sveistrup is a Danish writer who first achieved international recognition as the creator and showrunner of Forbrydelsen — known internationally as The Killing — one of the landmark crime dramas of the twenty-first century. The series, which aired from 2007 to 2012, helped spark the global appetite for Scandinavian crime fiction and television, and its detective Sarah Lund became one of the defining characters in modern crime drama. The show’s influence on British, American, and global television has been enormous.

The Chestnut Man, Sveistrup’s debut novel published in 2018, transfers his signature skills — meticulous plotting, atmospheric dread, psychologically complex characters — from screen to page. The novel follows Danish police detectives investigating a series of murders in which the killer leaves a small figure made of chestnuts at each crime scene, and where the victims are linked to a politician’s daughter who disappeared the previous year. The book was adapted into a successful Netflix series shortly after publication.

Sveistrup’s literary thriller has the density and confidence of a writer who spent decades perfecting the crime narrative in a different medium. The transition from screenwriter to novelist is not always successful, but in Sveistrup’s case the skills transfer remarkably well: the book has the visual economy and pace of television crime drama while developing the interiority that only prose fiction can provide. For fans of Nordic noir who want to read the genre’s foundational television creator in his new medium, The Chestnut Man is a satisfying experience.