Tove Jansson

Born Tove Marika Jansson on 9 August 1914 in Helsinki, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, she was the daughter of the sculptor Viktor Jansson and the Swedish-born illustrator Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, who designed many of Finland's postage stamps; her younger brothers Per Olov and Lars became a photographer and a writer and cartoonist. The family lived in Helsinki and spent its summers on the islands of Pellinki east of Porvoo, and she was selling drawings to magazines while still in her teens. She studied at Konstfack in Stockholm from 1930 to 1933, lodging with her uncle Einar Hammarsten, then at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and in Paris. From 1929 until it closed in 1953 she drew for the Swedish-language satirical magazine Garm, some hundred covers and around five hundred other drawings, and one of her cartoons showed Hitler as a crying baby in a nappy, placated by European statesmen with slices of cake. In 1944 she moved into a tower studio on Ullanlinnankatu in Helsinki, which she bought with a large bank loan in 1952. The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945) went almost unnoticed, but Comet in Moominland (1946) and Finn Family Moomintroll (1948) carried her abroad, and from 1954 the London Evening News ran her Moomin comic strip, which spread to newspapers in a dozen countries before her brother Lars took it over. In 1956 she met the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner for the rest of her life, and from 1964 the two built a cabin on the small island of Klovharu, where they spent at least twenty-five summers. She won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966. With The Sculptor's Daughter (1968) she began writing for adults, and after Moominvalley in November (1970) she wrote no more Moomin novels; The Summer Book (1972) followed, along with five further novels and five collections of stories. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975. Ill with cancer through the 1990s, she suffered a severe brain haemorrhage in 2000 and died in Helsinki on 27 June 2001, aged eighty-six.

Studying in Stockholm in the early 1930s, Jansson lodged with her uncle Einar Hammarsten, a professor of medical chemistry, and kept pilfering food from his kitchen. To stop her, he told her that a Moomintroll lived in the kitchen closet and breathed cold air down people's necks. She kept the name, and years later gave it to a family.