Lisbeth Libby Salander is a fictional character created by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson in his award-winning Millennium series.
She first appeared in the novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , as an antisocial computer hacker with a photographic memory who teams up with Mikael Blomkvist , an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called Millennium. The character has been positively received, with David Denby writing that Lisbeth Salander clearly accounts for a large part of the Millennium series' success.
In the various film adaptations of the novels, actresses Noomi Rapace , Rooney Mara , and Claire Foy have all received praise for their portrayals of the character. In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character of Lisbeth Salander on what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult. Kulla" displayed on the door of her apartment on the top floor of Fiskargatan 9 in Stockholm. Kulla" is an abbreviation of " Villa Villekulla ", the name of Pippi Longstocking's house.
Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup, and told Larsson several times that she wanted to get a tattoo of a dragon. The author often emailed Therese while writing the novels to ask her about her life and how she would react in certain situations. After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character was inspired by an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and he did nothing to stop it.
Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness, which she refused to grant. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor. Lisbeth Salander has red hair which she dyes raven black. Upon her first appearance in the series, she is described as "a pale, androgynous young woman who has hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows".
