MY WRITING DAY
PASCAL ENGMAN
The journalist turned bestselling crime writer tells Lynne Hackles about preferring a structured day and how he’s hardwired as a planner
Pascal Engman, the son of a Swedish mother and Chilean father, lives in Stockholm. Since his first novel, The Patriots, was published in 2017 Pascal has become the best-selling Swedish crime novelist of his generation, with more than 600,000 copies of his books sold in Sweden.
Formerly a journalist at the Swedish evening newspaper Expressen, Pascal has been praised by Camilla Läckberg, David Lagercrantz and The Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy as a rising star of Swedish crime fiction. Does all this praise added more pressure on him?
‘It’s nothing compared to the pressure I put on myself. But all jokes aside – Iam extremely humbled by that. I have looked up to so many Swedish authors – Henning Mankell, Fredrik Backman, Camilla Läckberg, David Lagercrantz, Jan Guillou, and Steig Larson among others, and to be named amongst them is really special.