SHANGHAI, Aug. 30 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- On August 28, the Chinese translation of "The Girl who Played With Fire" was launched at the Swedish Pavilion. It is a work of the famous Swedish writer Stieg Larsson and one of the world's best-selling novel series of the second millenium. The general representative of the Swedish Pavilion, Annika, attended and spoke at the event along with the late Stieg Larsson's colleague and friend Kurdo Baksi, the famous writer Feiyu, scholar Yan Feng and Zhu Jianxin, who all also participated in talks. Huang Yuhai, chairman of 99 Online Bookstore and the Swedish Consulate General in Shanghai Catharina Cappelin were also present. The Chinese translation of “The Girl who Played With Fire,” sequel to the “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and second part of the “Millennium trilogy” is jointly produced by the People's Literature Publishing House and 99 Online Bookstore.
The late Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, "The Girl who Played With Fire" and "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest" have been extremely successful in recent years, and are a best-selling Swedish literary work. Within 5 years, it has been translated into 30 languages and has sold more than 44 million copies in 40 countries around the world, more than "The Da Vinci Code." The Swedish population of 9 million people has bought 3 million copies. In the US it has sold 9 million copies, and in the United Kingdom, it set a record for single-week sales with 60,834 copies, more than J.K. Rowling.
In 2009, Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev put the novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" onto the big screen for the first time, gaining a big success that topped Swedish and Danish box office sales that year, over "Transformers 2", and with global box office sales of 87.6 million U.S. dollars. A year later, in 2010, Sony Pictures Entertainment from Hollywood was attracted by this novel as well, and after the famous director David Fincher’s version of "Dragon Tattoo Girl" had confirmed 007 actor Daniel Craig and other actors as part of the cast, the casting of much anticipated female leading role, the mysterious hacker Lisbet Salander, has finally fallen to the 25-year-old Rooney Mara.
Definitely, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series created another peak of Swedish literature. Swedish literature is not only famous for best-sellers, but has had a deep global influence on children’s literature and traditional literature. In children’s literature, the Swedish Astrid Lindgren Prize is together with the Hans Christian Andersen Prize as the two most important children's literature awards, and the world-famous Nobel Prize for Literature has a history of more than a hundred years, and is regarded among the world's top literary awards. Accordingly, the Swedish pavilion fully supports and helps arrange Swedish literary activities as well. As early as August 4, the Swedish pavilion launched an event called ”Pippi Longstocking’s Day” with a series of activities, including the theme of "Following Astrid Lindgren's Footprints: Contemporary Children's Literature in Sweden and China" seminar as well as a musical performance of Pippi Longstocking.
