Millennium is a series of Swedish crime novels, created by journalist Stieg Larsson. The two primary characters in the saga are Lisbeth Salander, an asocial computer hacker with a photographic memory, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium. Seven books in the series have been published, with the first three, known as the "Millennium Trilogy", written by Larsson.
Larsson planned the series as having 10 installments, but completed only three before his sudden death in 2004. All three were published posthumously by Norstedts Förlag: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2005, The Girl Who Played with Fire in 2006, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest in 2007. Larsson's novels were originally printed in Swedish, with English editions by Quercus in the United Kingdom and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States translated by Steven T. Murray. The books have since been translated by many publishers in over 50 countries. By March 2015, 80 million copies of the first three books had been sold worldwide.
In 2013, Norstedts Förlag commissioned Swedish author and crime journalist David Lagercrantz to continue the Millennium series with Larsson's characters. The Girl in the Spider's Web was published in 2015, followed by The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye in 2017, and The Girl Who Lived Twice in 2019. With Lagercrantz's first two installments, the Millennium series had sold over 100 million copies worldwide by May 2019, making it one of the best-selling book series in history. The series has been adapted into Swedish and American films, as well as graphic novels by Vertigo Comics.
In November 2021, publishing house Polaris acquired the rights to the series from Larsson's estate and announced a new trilogy of books written by Swedish author Karin Smirnoff. The Girl in the Eagle's Talons was published in 2022.
Production
Origins
After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character of Lisbeth Salander was created out of an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and did nothing to stop it. Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness — which she refused. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor. The veracity of this story has since been questioned, after a colleague from Expo magazine reported to Rolling Stone that Larsson had told him that he had heard the story secondhand and retold it as his own.
In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character on what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult. Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup and told him several times that she wanted to get a tattoo of a dragon. The author often emailed Therese while writing the novels to ask her about her life and how she would react in certain situations.
Larsson's friend and colleague Kurdo Baksi believes the author was also influenced by two murders in 2001 and 2002: Melissa Nordell, a model killed by her boyfriend, and Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish-Kurdish woman killed by her father. Both women were killed at the hands of men or as victims of honor crime. To Larsson, there was no difference, and the "systematic violence" against women highly affected and inspired him to take action against these crimes through his writing. Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson's longtime partner, wrote that "the trilogy allowed Stieg to denounce everyone he loathed for their cowardice, their irresponsibility, and their opportunism: Couch potato activists, sunny-day warriors, fair-weather skippers who pick and choose their causes; false friends who used him to advance their own careers; unscrupulous company heads and shareholders who wrangle themselves huge bonuses... Seen in this light, Stieg couldn't have had any better therapy for what ailed his soul than writing his novels."