Jo Nesbø

Jon Nesbø was born 29 March 1960 and first found success as singer and songwriter for Di Derre, a Norwegian country-pop group whose second album nearly went double platinum before a women's magazine forced a title change from Kvinner & Klær to Jenter & Sånt. In 1997, a year before the band's final record, he published The Bat, a crime novel that won the Riverton Prize and the Glass Key for best Nordic thriller. After 1998 he left music to write full-time, building an international series around inspector Harry Hole that collected awards on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2007 he pivoted to children's fiction with Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder, which became another runaway hit. The first screen adaptation, Headhunters, arrived in 2011; since then his crime novels and children's books have spawned multiple films and series, often with Nesbø writing the scripts himself.