THE BRITISH PUBLICATION OF the work of Henning Mankell, Swedish creator of the downbeat Inspector Kurt Wallander, is slow, haphazard and unchronological. The patience of fans, said to include the Prime Minister, continues to be tested. Yet even the fraction of his novels, thrillers, plays and children’s stories so far translated into English reveal him to be a prolific writer — if, as I discover, one who is a tad parsimonious with words when it comes e-mailing journalists. “

I think yes, OK,” is all he writes when I suggest we meet. After some prodding, he follows up with: “But I cannot tell you WHERE. It might be Gothenburg, Stockholm or even the island of Gotland.” Gotland, where his father-in-law, the film director Ingmar Bergman lives, appeals, but he finally agrees to lunch in Gothenburg. “Confirmed,” he writes.

“The man from London?” he greets me, if that's the word, from across the hotel lobby. “Well, come on then.” Obediently I go to the table he has found. He looks exactly how I imagine Inspector Wallander. At 58, Mankell is middle-aged, paunchy, and, in his lumberjack shirt, scruffy. Yet with his floppy white hair and occasional smile, he is still handsome. He orders fish and red wine, a healthier combination than usually managed by Wallander, whose addiction to junk food has given him high blood pressure, a weight problem and, in later books, diabetes.

Wallander, to boot, is an insomniac, a depressive and a drink driver. Only in the matter of women is his record better than his creator’s: he has been divorced, but Mankell is on his fourth marriage. (Both, incidentally, have taken Aids tests.) Mankell says that he has strong ideas about how Wallander looks but he is not going to tell me what they are: “My readers have millions of different views of him and I like that.”

He is right about the millions: Wallander’s nine procedural adventures among the frosty farmlands and moral mires of southern Sweden have sold some 16 million copies worldwide. Fifteen films and television dramatisations have been made, with Mankell each time agreeing the actor, a right of veto that he will retain now the BBC is getting round to its first adaptation.

Germany, apparently, adores the Wallander books more than any other nation, but they make ideal reading at this end of a long British winter. As a young man, Mankell worked for two years as a merchant seaman, sailing to Middlesbrough 30 times, which must be something close to 29 times too many. Although Sweden has become synonymous here with Ikea, Sven-Göran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson (Mankell refuses to comment on the last of these ambassadors), the Middlesbrough sector of the English psyche is well twinned with the rougher, bleaker Sweden that Mankell’s fiction occupies.

The book I am here to discuss, however, is not a Wallander novel nor set in Sweden, but a magic realist fable about a gang of African street children. Chronicler of the Winds emerges from the other side of Mankell’s life, lived in Africa. As a child he fantasised about Africa as a kind of Neverland and reality did not disappoint when he finally visited Guinea-Bissau when he was 24. For nearly 20 years he has spent half of each year in Maputo, Mozambique, where he runs, unpaid, its national theatre. Chronicler was published in Sweden in 1995 under the title Comedia Infantil. It remains important to him.

“I have lived for so many years in Maputo and, like all other cities in Africa, it has an enormous amount of street children. The reason for a child to become a street child is always very different. It could be, first of all, because of war, the parents have been killed. The normal reason is poverty, that the parents are too poor to take care of the children. The third is actually a choice. There are many street children that choose it because they think that they can live a better life in the street, which in itself is terrible, actually.”

The urchins in Chronicler are so individually realised that I ask if he built relationships with street children. “There was a group of, I think, seven or eight street children that were sort of working very close to where I lived.

“Out of these seven children, four are now dead by various reasons: malaria, diarrhoea, one was killed in a car accident. They’d used a lot of drugs so they lived short and hard lives. And it took, I think, over a year before they started to tell me the truth. Before they just told me lies about what they thought I wanted to hear so I would give them money.”

The importance of constructing a narrative from your life is a theme not only in Chronicler but in his 2003 book on Aids in Africa, I Die, But the Memory Lives On in which he encourages Aids sufferers to leave “memory books” about their lives. Among many upsetting stories is one about a young man in northern Mozambique so poor that he painted shoes on his feet. In Chronicler a character does exactly the same. Mankell says that the image, which he witnessed rather than invented, is never far from his mind. “It tells us such enormous important thing about human beings, that we use our imagination as tools for survival.”

It is difficult not to conclude that much of the power of Chronicler comes from Henning's personal identification with abandoned children. When he was one, his mother, an academic, deserted her family, leaving him to be brought up in the forests of extreme northern Sweden by his father, a judge. In interviews he tends to say that she merely did what many fathers do, but one of his children’s books, A Bridge to the Stars, makes clear how deeply the abandonment injured him. Living alone with his father, a forester, Joel invents an idealised version of the missing mother and fears that his father will leave too. One sequence echoes a directly autobiographical passage in I Die, in which Mankell writes about finding a picture of himself as a baby sitting on his mother's knee. “She was,” he writes, “holding me as if I were a burden she would like to put down as soon as possible.”

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy