Generations of children have fallen in love with Pippi Longstocking. Readers are charmed by her sense of fun. This sumptuous gift edition produced to celebrate the recent 50th anniversary of first publication but also the centenary of Oxford Children’s Books has a sparkling new translation, and throughout there are the most stunning and wonderful collage pictures from award-winning illustrator, Lauren Child.
Pippi is nine years old, lives alone with a horse and a money, and does exactly as she pleases. She has no mother and her father is king of a cannibal island. She gets up when she likes, never goes to school, talks a great deal, keeps a chest of gold coins under the bed, and is unexpectedly strong. This book contains her marvellous escapades.
Astrid Lindgren was born Astrid Ericsson on November 14, 1907 on a farm called Nas outside the small town of Vimmerby in Sweden. As a child, Astrid loved to read, particularly books which had girls as the heroine. She loved Anne of Green Gables and the Pollyanna books. One of her strongest recollections as a child was meeting two pilots, Captains Sonders and Madicken. One of them tried to land on the roof of her house, or that is the way it looked at the time.
After attending public school, she moved to Stockholm and married Sture Lindgren. The Lindgrens had two children. Astrid wrote her first story, Britt-Mari Opens Her Heart, in 1944. Her second book, Pippi Longstocking, which she wrote as a present for her daughter's tenth birthday, was published in 1945. She received the Raben & Sjogren's Best Children's Book prize for Pippi and became a book editor for that publisher for many years. She also received numerous other honours and awards including the International Book Award.
Astrid published more than one hundred books in her lifetime and is still the most popular children's author in Sweden. Her books have been translated into more than sixty languages. She died in 2002, aged 94.
