Eva Lindström – laureate 2022 1
Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award ways of understand
ing a child’s feelings and relationships. Through the lens of the child’s imagination, the world appears in a different light. The naïveté of the child’s gaze also enables a certain scepticism toward grown-ups, as in Hit med våra mössor (Give Us Back Our Hats!, 2009), in which a birthday child’s father makes all the children’s hats disappear. A world that is constantly changing Eva Lindström rarely portrays the safety of home. Instead, she shows the world as ever changeable. An ordinary day can be interrupted by an extraordinary event, as in the illustrated chapter books about the two friends Mats and Roj (2002 and 2005) or the whodunit-like picture book Vilma och Mona spanar och smyger (Vilma and Mona Go Sneaking and Spying, 2004). Objects outlined in thin, vibrating lines are sprinkled across the pages in motley groups rich with tiny details. Each item plays its own capricious role in an ongoing game in which new things are constantly being found, lost, and then found again. Anything is liable to disappear. “No one knows where you are, not even you,” say Vilma and Mona as they look for things that have moved. Lindström uses play and imagination to form the framework of a world in which familiar places and objects turn alien and elusive. Nature The natural world is ever-present in Scandinavian children’s literature and 18 in the world of picture books. Flowering meadows and deep, dark forests are familiar backdrops. Eva Lindström’s books often portray a more ambivalent relationship to nature. The picture book I skogen (In the Woods, 2008) features a forest that suddenly walks off, only to return later just as unexpectedly. It is a contemporary story that conveys apprehension in the face of threatening changes in the world around us. An atmosphere of myth or fairy tale hangs heavy over the woods. Everything here is animate. The trees and the birds can speak; the clouds race “crazily” across the sky. The depiction of the environment in Kom hem Laila (Come Home, Laila; 2018) also breathes mysticism and mystery. Here, the pared-down, poetic text and the colouristic landscapes in the pictures together form the distinctive foundation for the story. In Jaga inte oss (Don’t Hunt Us, 2022), nature and the woods play a similarly important role. For the two squirrel narrators and their friend, the hare, the woods represent safety. But the peace they seek is threatened by a hunt and by the hunters, the “dorks of the forest.” How will the squirrels collect their nuts now? Dynamically drawn in a colour palette that follows the hours of the day, the woods form an integral part of a story that uses playful humour to pose big questions. In Ingenting är omöjligt för oss (Nothing Is Impossible for Us, 2021), the reader follows two small children and their dog as they land on another planet. A stripped