THE FAIRY-TALE WRITER WHO CHALLENGED A GOVERNMENT

Just like her creation, Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren wasn’t afraid to upset the apple cart

- John Vinocur

WHEN ASTRID LINDGREN, the famous children’s author, ran up against the crushing Swedish tax laws, she fought back with the most effective weapon of all—her talent as a storyteller.

On a cold autumn night in Stockholm in 1941, a seven-year-old girl named Karin, who had been bedridden for weeks with a lung inflammation, called out to her mother. Karin had run through all the stories her parents knew, and she was beginning to wear out her mother’s patience. So when Astrid Lindgren came into her daughter’s room, she announced she was out of stock of stories and that Karin would have to produce a subject. Her daughter paused a moment, then blurted, “Tell me about Pippi Longstocking!”

Astrid Lindgren had never heard that peculiar name before, because Karin had just invented it. But sitting at her daughter’s bedside, she began to tell about a pig-tailed little girl who is strong enough to carry a horse, lives alone with a monkey named Mr Nilsson, sleeps with her feet on the pillow and generally does what no-one else would dare do.

That’s Pippi. And that was how Astrid Lindgren, then 34 and wife of Sture Lindgren of the Swedish Motorists Association, accidentally started a career that would make her the author of some 60 children’s books. Pippi has been translated into 28 languages (including Japanese, Afrikaans and SerboCroatian). In the Soviet Union, where more than 2.2 million Astrid-Lindgren books are in print, they are handed from child to child until they are dogeared. Pippi has even leapt on to the screen as the heroine of an immensely popular movie and later as the star of an international television series.