Barbro Lindgren. Award Laureate 2014 1
characters are Loranga, a father who loves bright
orange clothes and wears a tea cozy on his head; his son Masarin, brought up on sweet buns and love; grandfather Dartanjang, who emerges from his woodshed every morning with a new identity; and a great-grandfather who has moved into a tree, eats birdseed, and thinks he is a cuckoo. They all live a carefree life, untroubled by rules or norms, in a tolerant world where the thief Gustav, for example, gets to keep everything he steals. In these absurd tales, anything can happen – is the garage suddenly full of tigers? We are not surprised. During the 1970s, Barbro Lindgren’s output became ever more varied. The collection of poems Gröngölingen är på väg (The Green Woodpecker Is on His Way, ill. Katarina Olausson Säll) appeared in 1974 and is one of her most beloved. What seems simple is philo-sophically profound, and speaks directly to the child reader. In all, Barbro Lindgren has written half a dozen volumes of poetry for children, and a great number of her poems have been set to music. Many of her works have also been adapted for the stage and the opera, and by 1975, she herself had already published a book of plays, Barbros pjäser for barn och andra (Barbro’s plays for children and other people). For the youngest Sagan om den lilla farbrorn (The Story of the Little Old Man, 1979) marked the beginning of a long-lived co-operation with illustrator Eva Eriksson. The book was also the first of many for the very young. In it, we meet two figures to whom Barbro Lindgren would frequently return – a lonely human and a friendly dog. In this poignant tale of friendship, it is the dog, placing a cold nose in the old man’s hand, which assuages the man’s feelings of abandonment. Barbro Lindgren also co-operated with Eva Eriksson on Mamman och den vilda bebin (The Wild Baby, 1980), which was soon followed by several sequels. The books are about a mother and her wild little boy, who is hanging from a ceiling lamp one minute, and taking a bath in the toilet or running off to the woods the next. He does everything a child mustn’t do, and tries his mother severely. The humorous pictures are enhanced by Barbro Lindgren’s ingenious rhymes, and vice versa. The Wild Baby books were enthusiastically received. But Barbro Lindgren’s greatest success during the 1980s came with her long series about little Max, again illustrated by Eva Eriksson. The series began with Max bil