Larsson's partner 'didn't just proofread' trilogy

Eva Gabrielsson, the long-time partner of author Stieg Larsson, has admitted having a greater role in the late Swedish author’s writing than previously believed.

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The revelations come from an email interview between Gabrielsson and the Danish newspaper Politiken, just days after a former colleague of Larsson claimed that the author of the wildly popular “Millennium” crime trilogy “quite simply was not able to write”.

“I didn’t just proofread,” Gabrielsson wrote in her correspondence with Politiken.

“I have a hard time seeing what is solely Stieg and solely me in Millennium’s language, contents, and so on. It’s not about who wrote it down. Or edited.”

The details appear to contradict previous claims by Gabrielsson, who lived with Larsson for more than 30 years and has been involved in a bitter dispute with his heirs about the rights to the Millennium books, that she had very little to do with the writing of the books.

Last week, Larsson’s former colleague at the TT news agency, Anders Hellberg – now a journalist with the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper – wrote an article questioning whether or not Larsson could have actually written the Millennium books on his own.

Hellberg went on to suggest that Gabrielsson may have been heavily involved in the writing of the crime novels.

But Larsson’s former partner was quick to deny the claims, telling the Expressen newspaper that Hellberg’s theory was “nonsense”.

“I simply proofread and carried on conversations with Stieg. But I didn’t get involved in the actual crafting,” she told the Swedish tabloid.

But in her emails with the Danish publication, Gabrielsson writes that she also proposed changes not only in the writing of the Millennium books, but also their contents.

When Politiken went on to ask directly whether or not her answers could be interpreted to mean that she and Larsson wrote the books together, however, Gabrielsson dodged the question.

“I can’t discuss that publicly,” she answered.