KunstenaarSwedish
Astrid Lindgren
5 actieve items
Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren, born Ericsson on 14 November 1907 at Nas farm outside Vimmerby in Smaland, spent her childhood in a world that would become the wellspring of her writing. Growing up among farm workers, forest roads, and the particular light of the Swedish countryside, she absorbed the stories and characters that would later populate some of the most read books of the twentieth century. She left Vimmerby as a young woman, eventually settling in Stockholm, where she worked as a secretary and later joined the children's literature editorial board at Raben and Sjogren.
The character that would define her career began as a bedtime story. In 1941, her daughter Karin fell ill and asked her mother to invent a story about a girl called Pippi Longstocking, making up the name on the spot. Lindgren told the story for years before writing it down, and in 1945 Pippi Langstrump won first prize in a competition at Raben and Sjogren. The book introduced a girl who lived alone, lifted horses, and answered to no adult authority, a provocation that delighted children and unsettled some educators in equal measure.
Over five decades, Lindgren wrote more than 30 books for children. Karlsson-pa-taket appeared in 1955, Emil i Lonneberga began in 1963, and Ronja Rovardotter arrived in 1981 as a darker meditation on loyalty and growing up. Her books were translated into more than 100 languages, and by 2010 total sales had reached approximately 167 million copies. She was never simply a storyteller, she was also a formidable public voice. In 1976 she published a satirical fairy tale in Expressen attacking Sweden's marginal tax rates, which had reached 102 percent of her income; the piece became front-page news and is widely credited with contributing to the Social Democrats' election defeat that year. Through the late 1980s she co-authored articles on factory farming that directly triggered the passage of the so-called Lex Lindgren, at the time the strictest animal welfare law in the world.
The honors she accumulated were substantial. She received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1958, the Swedish Academy's Gold Medal in 1971, the German Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1978, and the Right Livelihood Award in 1994. After her death on 28 January 2002, the Swedish government created the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the largest children's literature prize in the world at five million Swedish kronor annually.
At auction, Lindgren's presence is almost entirely as a cultural artifact rather than a visual artist. The nearly 100 items recorded in the Swedish market fall overwhelmingly into collectibles: first edition sets, individual signed volumes, commemorative silver coins, and licensed figurines. The strongest result on record is a complete first-edition set of collected works that sold for 35,000 SEK, followed by an early Pippi Langstrump copy at 8,000 SEK. The market is driven by Swedish houses with strong provincial collector bases, particularly Formstad Auktioner, Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5, and Crafoord Auktioner Lund.