Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Astrid Lindgren's second world war diaries published in Sweden

The Pippi Longstocking author’s personal account of the years 1939-45 acclaimed as a ‘shocking history lesson’

Astrid Lindgren in 1987
Wartime thoughts … Astrid Lindgren in 1987. Photograph: Schmitt/EPA
Years before her stories of the red-braided Pippi Longstocking would make her famous, Astrid Lindgren was a 32-year-old mother in Stockholm with two small children, recording the nightmares of the second world war in 17 volumes of diaries that have just been published in Scandinavia for the first time.

Documenting the progress of war and how it affected her family life, the diaries run from 1 September 1939 until the end of hostilities in 1945 – the year that the publication of Pippi Longstocking would change the Swedish author’s life for good. It took a team led by Lindgren’s granddaughter Annika Lindgren two years to turn the 17 handwritten volumes into the just-published Krigsdagböcker (War Diaries). The book includes facsimile images of the pages, which Lindgren peppered with press cuttings, as well as unpublished family photographs from the war years.
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