The bestselling Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, who is best known for penning the hugely successful Inspector Kurt Wallander novels, has died aged 67.

      Mankell, who first revealed he had cancer in January last year, "died in his sleep" in Sweden's second city of Gothenburg, his publisher Leopard said.

     "He passed away quietly last night in the wake of disease.

        The author was considered as a leading light in the Nordic Noir genre after creating the famous character, Swedish police investigator Kurt Wallander in his best-selling novels. The series gained further recognition after it was turned into two television shows, including one starring British actor Sir Kenneth Branagh, according to The Telegraph.

     Mankell, who lived in both Sweden and Mozambique, published more than 40 novels, plays and children's books, selling around 40 million copies around the world.

     "Solidarity with those in need runs through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end."

     His father Ivar was a lawyer. Ivar and Ingrid divorced when he was one year old. He and an older sister lived with his father for most of his childhood, and barely saw his mother until he was 15.

     When the family moved to a remote town in the north of Sweden, the young Mankell immersed himself in books, reading extensively about Africa, and learned that imagination could be an instrument of survival, not just of creativity.

     "In my mind I created another mother for myself to replace the one who had left," he once said. "And I think this was me at my best, when the forces of imagination had the same value as the real world."

   Unimpressed by school, he left at the age of 16 to join the merchant navy, becoming a stevedore laborer on a Swedish ship carrying coal and iron ore. 

    In 1966, he returned to Paris to become a writer. He took part in the student uprising of 1968. He later returned to work as a stagehand in Stockholm.  At the age of 20 he had already started as author and assistant director at the Riksteater in Stockholm. He wrote his first play, the Amusement Park, about Swedish colonialism.

       Kurt Wallander first appeared in 1989's Faceless Killers, investigating a murder in which the only clue is that the perpetrators appear to have been foreigners. When that information was leaked to the public, it triggered a series of racially-motivated attacks, explored in the book through the themes of racism and national identity in Sweden.

      On 12 June 2008, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.