Jenny Rogneby

“Jenny Rogneby is the new queen of Nordic noir. Her heroine is like no one else. And the way she writes! She grabs you and you just can’t stop reading.” — DAVID LAGERCRANTZ, author of the #1 best-selling The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Jenny Rogneby was born in Ethiopia 1974, but was given away for adoption when she was one year old. She grew up in the north part of Sweden, in a small town called Boden. With both parents working in the Swedish army and with the cold snowy winters, Jenny grew up in an environment different from most African little girls’. Her mother and father discovered her musical talent and put her in piano- and dancing classes at the age of five – and that was the beginning of her first career as a pop artist. Her biggest performance was as the opening act for Michael Jackson in front of an audience of 80 000 in Tallinn, Estonia. She also released an album in Japan at the big record company JVC, but in Sweden she's mostly known as a singer and one of the members of the girl group Cosmo4. The group had some radiohits and performed in “Melodifestivalen”, the Swedish TV broadcast semi-final for the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007.

Criminologist / Criminal Investigator / Author

Alongside her music career Jenny Rogneby got more and more interested in human behavior, what lies behind the choices we make, and how society affects us. She began studying subjects such as criminology, sociology, law and psychology at Stockholm University where she later became a Criminologist. For seven years she worked professionally as a Criminal Investigator at Stockholm City Police Department. She has investigated everything from thefts to robberies, rapes and murders. The work inspired her to start writing and she formed the character Leona Lindberg, a Police Investigator who balances a double life with one foot on each side of the law. Jenny, who never planned to be an author, believed in her idea and decided to follow it through. She took a year's leave from work, sold her apartment and all her furniture in Stockholm, moved abroad and wrote LEONA - The Die is Cast. She submitted her manuscript to Swedish publishers and 10 publishing houses were interested in releasing her debut. Now, Jenny is a best selling author and one of her generation’s most intriguing crime authors. The LEONA series is released in 14 countries and the film rights are sold to Hollywood.

Jenny about her writing

"A big part of my writing revolves around recreating the images I see in my head. Like I am retelling the plot in a film I have seen, in detail. Most of the time I see parts of scenes like a short video. The little girl that robs a bank in my first crime novel LEONA - The die is cast came to me in that way. She was carrying a teddy bear and walked as in slow motion in to a bank. Some of the events I see in my head are eerily real, others feel like twisted versions of reality. My characters are often the kind of people that break the norms of society, by their way of being or thinking or acting. It is not the blood or the action that excites me the most about the crime genre, it is how people deal with the ethical and moral questions that come from living on either side of the law. Where are their boundaries and how do they justify their actions to themselves and to others?"