Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden's most prominent novelists. She was born in 1933 in Risinge, a small village in the middle of Sweden. She has written many novels which have been widely published in other Scandinavian languages, German, Finnish, Dutch and French, and have won numerous prizes and awards. She became a member of the Swedish Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, but resigned in 1989 when the Academy did not make a statement that she could approve of about the Rushdie case.
Blackwater has been awarded the Swedish Crime Academy's Award for the best crime novel, the August Prize, and the Nordic Council's Literary Prize.