Catharina Ingelman Sundberg Books in Order

If you want the original setup: The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules
If you want the whole caper arc: The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules → The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! → The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly → The Little Old Lady Strikes Back
If you like globetrotting heists: The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! → The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly
If you want a later, village-saving adventure: The Little Old Lady Strikes Back

Catharina Ingelman Sundberg was born in 1948 and grew up in Djursholm, just outside Stockholm. Books, history, and curiosity seem to have been early constants, and they still shape the way she writes.

Before readers met her comic criminal pensioners, she had already lived a very different professional life. She studied history, art history, archaeology, Nordic languages, and ethnology, then went into marine archaeology. For about fifteen years she dived for wrecks and investigated finds linked to Viking ships, East Indiamen, and slave ships.

She worked at maritime museums in Stockholm, Oslo, and Malmö, and spent four years with the Western Australian Museum in Perth. That background helps explain why even her lighter novels feel grounded. She likes facts, physical details, and the messiness of real people.

Later, she trained as a journalist in Gothenburg and worked in newspapers and television before joining Svenska Dagbladet, where she stayed from 1989 to 2010. For a long time, book writing happened beside the day job. Journalism seems to have sharpened two things that stayed with her, a feel for everyday language and an eye for the small detail that makes a character believable.

Then she changed lanes.

After years of doing both, she left the paper in 2009 and made a serious run at fiction. She had already published historical novels and nonfiction, and in 1999 she received the Lars Widding award as author of the year for historical novels. Books like Viking Gold and Viking Silver show how naturally she turns research into story. She has also written across genres, including popular science, cartoons, and books for younger readers.

Her international breakthrough came with The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, first published in Swedish in 2012. The novel grew out of her anger at how older people were being treated in Sweden, especially when care homes seemed to offer less dignity than prison. Rather than write a grim protest novel, she turned the idea into a funny, fast caper. That approach carried into The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!, The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly, and The Little Old Lady Strikes Back, books readers tend to like for their mischief, warmth, and social bite.

She likes troublemakers.

More exactly, she likes people who are underestimated. Her fiction returns again and again to outsiders, stubborn women, unlikely teams, and characters who refuse to stay politely in the background. Some readers come for the comedy and the rebellious older heroes. Others come for the historical side, where her knowledge of Scandinavia's past and of life at sea gives the stories extra texture.

In recent years she has kept moving between humor and history. The Land that Vanished, published in 2024, opened a new historical series inspired by research into Doggerland. She has long been based in Stockholm, and her work still carries the blend that has marked it from the start: curiosity, research, social observation, and a belief that age does not make people less interesting.