Astrid Lindgren
1907 – 2002 · Sweden
Known for: Swedish author of Pippi Longstocking and champion of children's rights
“Never violence. A life spent on the side of children.”
Biography
Astrid Lindgren was born Astrid Anna Emilia Ericsson on 14 November 1907 at Näs, a tenant farm outside Vimmerby in the Swedish province of Småland, the second of four children. A country childhood and the stories told there supplied much of what she later wrote. After school she took work with the local newspaper, Vimmerby Tidning; a relationship with its chief editor left her pregnant and, in the small town of the day, disgraced. She moved to Stockholm, trained as a secretary and in 1926 gave birth to her son Lars, who was placed with a foster family for four years before she could bring him home. From 1928 she was a secretary at the Royal Automobile Club, married her employer Sture Lindgren in 1931 and had a daughter, Karin, in 1934.
Pippi Långstrump began as a name her daughter invented while ill in bed and grew into stories told at the bedside. In 1944 Lindgren took second prize in a competition held by the publisher Rabén & Sjögren; the following year she won it outright with Pippi Långstrump, a manuscript Bonniers had already turned down. Published with Ingrid Vang Nyman's drawings, the girl who lived alone, lifted her horse and obeyed no adult became one of the best loved characters in children's literature, translated into at least a hundred languages. Lindgren wrote more than thirty books for children, among them Mio, min Mio, the Emil of Lönneberga stories and The Brothers Lionheart, and for years she ran the children's list at Rabén & Sjögren. The Hans Christian Andersen Medal came in 1958, and by 2010 her books had sold some 167 million copies.
In 1976 she answered a marginal tax rate of 102 per cent with a satirical tale, Pomperipossa in Monismania, printed in Expressen; the debate that followed helped unseat a Social Democratic government after forty four years in office, though she remained a Social Democrat to the end. Accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1978 she spoke against the beating of children in an address titled Never Violence, and a year later Sweden became the first country to forbid corporal punishment. In the late 1980s she campaigned with the veterinarian Kristina Forslund for farm animals, and the welfare law that followed, presented to her on her eightieth birthday, is still called Lex Lindgren. She died at her home in central Stockholm on 28 January 2002 at the age of ninety four, and the prize founded in her name that year remains the richest in children's literature.