A Silenced Voice

A moving memoir of an inexplicable crime, a family’s loss, and a legacy preserved.

Kim Wall was a thirty-year-old Swedish freelance journalist with a rising career. Then, in the summer of 2017, she followed a story that led to an eccentric inventor in Copenhagen. Instead of writing the next day’s headline, she’d become one.

As the bizarre events of Kim’s murder unfolded, the world watched in shocked disbelief. For Kim’s distraught parents, Ingrid and Joachim, it was a devastating personal struggle. In the ensuing months, day by grueling day, they had to come to terms with their loss, process the global media attention, and endure the investigation and trial. In the end, they’d make certain that Kim would be seen not only as a victim but as a bright, funny, complicated, ethical, and selfless young woman—a loved and loving daughter, sister, fiancée, colleague, and friend.

Kim Wall’s life and promise may have been cut short, but everything she stood for lives on in this emotional memoir of braving the worst of days, moving forward, and never forgetting.

Ingrid Wall is a Swedish journalist, author, and mother of journalist Kim Wall. She’s worked for more than twenty-five years in the newspaper industry as general assignment reporter, news director, business reporter, and night news editor. In 2000 she was hired as head of communications at Trelleborg Municipality. She is the author of Trelleborg in the 1950s: City of My Childhood and The Beauty of Everyday Language, and coauthor with her husband, Joachim, of A Man, an Island, a Life.

Joachim Wall is a Swedish photojournalist and father of journalist Kim Wall. At the age of fifteen, he had his first photograph—which was of George Harrison—published, and his career was set. After running his own picture agency, in 1985 he started working as a press photographer for the evening paper Kvällsposten in Malmö. He went on to cover events big and small, both locally and internationally, for nearly thirty years. He also coauthored a book with his wife, Ingrid, A Man, an Island, a Life.

Born in Painesville, Ohio, into a bilingual family (her father’s native language was Finnish), Kathy Saranpa received her bachelor of arts (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and master of arts in Scandinavian languages and literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. She defended her dissertation at Yale University under the late George C. Schoolfield, an internationally renowned scholar and translator. She taught translation at the University of Eastern Finland before turning to full-time freelance translation. Dr. Saranpa has lived in Lund, and through her research on the Finland-Swedish writer Ina Lange, has visited Copenhagen many times. Her two children are both professional musicians living in the United States. Dr. Saranpa lives outside Berlin. Kim Wall: A Voice Silenced is her first published translation.