When Stieg Larsson died suddenly – totally unaware of the future success of his Millennium Trilogy – he had no will and wasn’t married to his partner, Eva Gabrielsson. What’s followed over the last 6 years is a battle over an inheritance worth 20 million and growing steadily.

The Girl in the £20m Inheritance Battle – partner of late novelist Stieg Larsson fights for share of fortune

by Esther Addley

As the author of three dark and violent crime novels, Stieg Larsson was at home in a dysfunctional landscape of simmering resentments and rancourous family secrets. But the Swedish writer cannot have foreseen how, almost five years to the day after his death, the novels’ success would lead to bitterness and paranoia in his own family.

In one of the most spectacular and unlikely ascents in recent literary history, Larsson, largely unknown before his sudden death at 50, has become one of the most successful writers in the world. Some 20 million of his books, the first of which was published in Britain as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, have been sold to date in Europe alone. Last year he was the world’s second best selling author after Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, and his estate is thought to be worth more than £20m.

But because he and the architect Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of 32 years, never married and he died without making a will, the proceeds have defaulted to his blood relations, provoking controversy in Sweden and displeasure from Gabrielsson.

Today in the latest episode in the acrimonious saga, Erland and Joakim Larsson, the author’s father and brother, made Gabrielsson a public offer of £1.75mto settle the dispute, telling the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, “We have to move on.” Gabrielsson’s response was curt: “You don’t solve these things via media. It is so low. My lawyer will have to answer any further questions.”

She has previously accused the Larsson family of seeking to “make money from someone who can’t defend himself”, saying it would make her partner “absolutely furious”, and accusing Erland and Joakim of not being part of Stieg’s life while he was alive…

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