Lisbeth Salander

Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character created by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson in his award-winning Millennium series. She first appeared in the 2005 novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as an antisocial computer hacker with a photographic memory who teams up with Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium. Salander reappears in The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2007), sequels that Larsson had written before he died in 2004. The character has been positively received, with David Denby writing that Lisbeth Salander clearly accounts for a large part of the Millennium series' success. In the various film adaptations of the novels, actresses Noomi Rapace, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy have all received praise for their portrayals of the character. In 2013, publisher Norstedts Förlag commissioned David Lagercrantz to continue the Millennium series with The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015), The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017), and The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019). Creation In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character of Lisbeth Salander on what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult. In the Millennium series, Salander has the name "V. Kulla" displayed on the door of her apartment on the top floor of Fiskargatan 9 in Stockholm. "V. Kulla" is an abbreviation of "Villa Villekulla", the name of Pippi Longstocking's house. Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup, and told Larsson 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. She told him about her battle with anorexia and that she practiced kickboxing (previously jujitsu).