Astrid Lindgren

Born Astrid Anna Emilia Ericsson on November 14, 1907, on her family's farm at Näs, near Vimmerby in the Småland province of southern Sweden, the second of four children of a tenant farmer, she had a free, rambling country childhood that became the soil for almost every book she wrote. After leaving school she joined the local newspaper, Vimmerby Tidning, fell in love with its married chief editor, and at eighteen became pregnant; she went alone to Stockholm to learn secretarial work, gave birth to her son Lars in Copenhagen in 1926, and fostered him for four years before bringing him home. She married her employer at the Royal Automobile Club, Sture Lindgren, in 1931, and had a daughter, Karin, in 1934. It was Karin who, ill in bed with a fever, asked her mother to invent a story about a girl named Pippi Longstocking. The book Pippi Långstrump was rejected by Bonniers but won first prize at Rabén & Sjögren in 1945 and has since been translated into more than a hundred languages. She wrote more than thirty books for children across half a century, among them Mio, My Son (1954), The Brothers Lionheart (1973), and Ronia, the Robber's Daughter (1981), and worked for decades as a children's literature editor at her own publisher. By 2010 her books had sold roughly a hundred and sixty-seven million copies worldwide. She campaigned against punitive Swedish taxation and for animal welfare, prompting a 1988 reform known as Lex Lindgren. She died at her home in central Stockholm on January 28, 2002, aged ninety-four; her funeral at Storkyrkan was described as the nearest thing to a state funeral the country could offer.

In 1941 Astrid told her daughter Karin, sick in bed, an invented story about a girl named Pippi Longstocking. Three years later, recovering from a sprained ankle, she wrote the tales down in shorthand and had them bound into a homemade book for Karin's tenth birthday.