Barbro Lindgren. Award Laureate 2014 1
language and quiet humor. The tattered elephant i
s losing sawdust and in the final book, we witness her funeral. After a refill, however, she returns from the dead. Here, with greater skill than ever, Barbro Lindgren walks a tightrope between merry and serious – so sure-footedly that we can laugh even at a funeral. Barbro Lindgren’s two most recent picture books appeared in 2013. Vi leker att vi är pippifåglar (Let’s Pretend we’re Baby Birds, ill. Camilla Engman) is a game of make-believe, in which two flying boys save themselves from danger by the power of their imagination. In Här är den lilla gården (See the Little Farm, ill. Eva Eriksson), we meet characters like a pig who dreams of cream cakes, and a horse who stands philosophizing under a pear tree. A far cry from the farm animals we are used to. Animals with distinctive character traits and big personalities appear often in Barbro Lindgren’s books. Rosa the bull terrier got her own series in the 1990s, and a collection of poems, Rosas sånger (Rosa’s songs), in 2006. Barbro Lindgren’s three books about a little pig named Benny (ill. Olof Landström) are well-loved and have been frequently translated. And in Att älska ett djur hade länge varit min dröm (I Always Wanted an Animal to Love, 2010), a book for adults, she explores her relationship with our most common pets, as well as slugs, ants, and spiders. In the humanistic spirit of Astrid Lindgren Barbro Lindgren has a remarkable ability to convey what it was like to be a child. This, in combination with sensitivity to atmosphere and mood, makes her stories so real, so com-passionate, that they can sometimes be painfully affecting. Her works command a thematic and stylistic breadth granted to only a few, always with complete trust in the reader’s ability to see beneath the surface. With seemingly simple means and with allembracing warmth, Barbro Lindgren creates characters that live on long after her books are closed. In addition to the illustrators named above, Barbro Lindgren has also co-operated with Kjell Ivan Andersson, Magnus Bard, Fibben Hald, Anna Höglund, Dan Jonsson, Pija Lindenbaum, Sven Nordqvist, Rita Rapp-Lenn mor, Madeleine Pyk, Charlotte Ramel, Monica Schulz, Anna-Clara Tidholm and Cecilia Torudd.