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Bio

Ulf Treged was born in 1979 in a Swedish town of Öregrund, situated on the Baltic Sea coast, north of Uppsala. His mother worked as a teacher of Swedish in a local school, this probably affected his interest in literature and history. His father, a former fisherman, earned his living doing various jobs, including a publican and tourist guide.

Ulf remembers Öregrund as a sleepy fishing place where summer tourists were the only amusement. This might be the reason why the Norwegian Trondheim made such impression on him, when he first visited it at the age of 14 with his family. Wild landscape in the vicinity of one of Norway’s largest cities has left an indelible impression on Ulf and right here the story of his bestseller “The Night Belongs to the Sun” is set in.

Period of searching and studying

At the age of eighteen Ulf left to study at a renowned university in Uppsala, where he focused on political science and history. Then he continued his studies in Germany - the influence of Nazi Germany on politics of Scandinavian countries was of particular interest to him, which, moreover, permeates his famous novel.

After spending a year in Berlin, however, he finished his studies and began to muddle through various occupations, from a bartender and a messenger to a seller in a small local bookstore. As he himself admits, artistic life in Berlin enthralled him and on top of that, his professional work ceased to make sense to him. Retrospectively he evaluated this period as a great source of inspiration for his future work.

Birth of the novel “The Night Belongs to the Sun”

After returning to Sweden, however, it took him actually almost 10 years to publish his novel “The Night Belongs to the Sun” In this piece, Treged returns to places that fascinated him so much in childhood, to wild landscapes of fjords around the Norwegian Trondheim. “I only got inspired, when I revisited Trondheim years later”, he said in an interview for the Uppsala newspaper Nya Tidning in October 2014.

At that time Treged was experiencing not so favorable period of life, he had broken up with his girlfriend, left his then current job in an advertising agency and did not know what to do with his life. “So I packed up and rented a cottage in Norway. And yet there I really started writing. And I could not stop, “she says in the aforementioned interview.

New sensation of Scandinavian crime stories

The detective novel, “The Night Belongs to the Sun”, was published in Sweden in September 2014 and immediately became a sensation. In an interview for Swedish television in January 2015 Treged said that he has other stories in his head, but again, he will have to find the right place, where he will be able to write. He has not even ruled out that he could return to the character of Kirsten, the journalist from his novel “The Night Belongs to the Sun”