Jan Oskar Sverre Lucien Henri Guillou (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈjɑːn ɡɪˈjuː], French: [ɡiju]; born 17 January 1944) is a French-Swedish author and journalist.

[3] When Guillou's paternal grandfather was offered a position at the French embassy in Helsinki, Finland, his father decided to move with him and settled there.

[1] Guillou studied at Vasa Real in Stockholm but was expelled from the school because of his bad behaviour, including physical abuse, theft and blackmail.

[1] Guillou has described his upbringing, with the continuous physical abuse from his sadistic stepfather and the harsh treatment at the Solbacka school, in the semi-autobiographical novel Ondskan (1981).

According to the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen, his mother, his sister, his teachers and his friends from the Solbacka school have contested his account and called the book a hoax.

He currently writes a column for Aftonbladet and also comments occasionally in other news outlets on current events usually taking the left-wing and the Anti-American side, particularly the conflicts in the Middle East and miscellaneous domestic issues, including the United States' War on Terrorism, Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, the Swedish Security Service, Swedish courtroom procedures and public inquiries.

"[10] In 1973, Folket i Bild/Kulturfront, a left-wing magazine, published a series of articles written by Guillou and Peter Bratt, revealing a Swedish secret intelligence agency called Informationsbyrån ("The Information Bureau" or IB for short).

The articles in Folket i Bild/Kulturfront accused the IB staff of being engaged in alleged murder, break-ins, wiretapping against foreign embassies in Sweden and spying abroad.

According to Bratt, the verdict required some stretching of established judicial practice on the part of the court since none of them were accused of having acted in collusion with a foreign power.

[21] In October 2009, the Swedish news tabloid Expressen told this story under the headline "Guillou secret agent for Soviet Union".

The Swedish security service Säpo at the time knew of the contacts from Guillou's colleague Arne Lemberg, who suspected the activities could be illegal.

"[This quote needs a citation] Säpo at the time was skeptical towards Lemberg's report and commented that it found nothing illegal in a newspaper man writing an article based on public information and delivering it to Jevgenij Gergel.

The frontpage and headline assertions ("Guillou Secret Soviet Agent", "Confesses KGB mission", "Recruited by chief of espionage") according to PON "do not have well defined meanings".

[32] In an article published in Svenska Dagbladet in 1977, Guillou wrote, "I'm an optimist, I believe that Israel will cease to exist prior to Armageddon".

[33] The book Irak – det nya Arabien (Iraq – The New Arabia), written by Guillou and his then-wife Marina Stagh, was published in 1977.

Guillou and Stagh did the research for the book in 1975 and they assert that, at this time, "the Baath regime is clearly popular and among the most stable in the Arab World" (pp.

In his 2009 autobiography, Ordets makt och vanmakt (The Power and Powerlessness of the Word), Guillou states that quotes such as the ones cited could be considered true back then.

He does however also write that Saddam Hussein, who at the time of publishing was the vice-president under President Ahmed Hassan Al Bakr, was the actual leader of Iraq.

He argued that the media coverage was sensationalist and driven by profit considerations, and that the British government used the occasion to give an impression of success in the War on Terrorism.

Pointing out that no explosives had been found, he wrote in a column headlined "Don't believe anything written about al-Qaida" that the reactions had resulted in a victimization of the Muslim community.

It's a political spy novel told in the form of a pseudo-documentary about how Sweden in the early 1970s launches a military invasion of South Africa and Rhodesia to overthrow the white apartheid regimes.

His third novel, Ondskan (The Evil), was published in 1981, and is heavily autobiographical in depicting the author's teenage experience of an abusive step-father and a sadistic upperclass boarding school.

The plot follows Hamilton's career as a field operator for Sweden's security police and military intelligence agency, with various missions of investigating murder, infiltrating terrorist groups, rescuing hostages in foreign countries and committing assassinations, with a heavy focus on the world of politics and journalism.

Guillou stated that the tenth novel, En medborgare höjd över varje misstanke (1995), was the last book of the series and that it was impossible for Hamilton to return.

The main character of the trilogy is Arn Magnusson, a fictional Swedish nobleman in the 12th century who is forced to become a Knight Templar in Palestine during the Crusades.

In 2004 Guillou returned to contemporary crime novels meant to depict the world of Western politics and law in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror, mainly focusing on the new character Eva Johnsén-Tanguy, a high ranking police officer who comes to work within the Swedish security service.

She is introduced in Tjuvarnas marknad ("Market of Thieves") in 2004, and her story continues in Fienden inom oss ("The Enemy Within Us") in 2007 and Men inte om det gäller din dotter ("But Not If It Concerns Your Daughter") in 2008, a novel which also saw the return of Carl Hamilton.

[44] The series follows the family Lauritzen, starting in the late 19th century when three brothers from a poor fishing village in Norway are sent to Dresden in Germany to become engineers.

The plot includes ambitious engineering projects in Scandinavia and Africa, colonialism, communities of artists, underground resistance and espionage during the world wars, the nuclear threat, the impact of American culture on Sweden, the leftist movement in the '60s and '70s, Vietnam protests, economy and politics and law.