Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into
Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and
her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent
in the family’s art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman’s
cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would
later figure in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson
loved books as a child and set out from an early age to be an
artist. Her first illustration was published when she was fifteen
years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a
pseudonym. After attending art schools in both Stockholm and Paris,
she returned to Helsinki, where in the 1940s and ’50s she won
acclaim for her paintings and murals. From 1929 until 1953 Jansson
drew humorous illustrations and political cartoons for the
left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, and it was
there that what was to become Jansson’s most famous creation,
Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy
disposition, made his first appearance. Jansson went on to write
about the adventures of Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their
curious friends in a long-running comic strip and in a series of
books for children that have been translated throughout the world,
inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme
parks in Finland and Japan. Jansson also wrote eleven novels and
short story collections for adults, including The Summer Book and
The True Deceiver (both available as NYRB Classics). In 1994 she
was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy. Jansson and her
companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, continued to live part-time
in a cottage on the remote outer edge of the Finnish archipelago
until 1991.
Thomas Teal has translated Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Sun
City, and Fair Play, for which he was awarded the Bernard Shaw
Prize for translation from the Swedish for the years 2007–2009.
Ali Smith is the author of seven works of fiction, including the
novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in
2001, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award in 2005 and
was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
“[A] deft, unsentimental and starkly lovely series of lightly
fictionalized domestic sketches.” —Sadie Stein, The New York
Times
“This novel is about creativity from the very start—about how to
take a day . . . and make it really new and fresh, no matter what
age you are, what life you’re in.” —Ali Smith, From the
Introduction
“Jansson reveals the ambiguities in every encounter. There are no
easy moral judgments. Only the very finest art can show us so many
shades of psychological nuance, yet make them visible with such
clarity.” —Damion Searls, Harper’s
“Jansson is . . . content to let the narrative almost disappear
into what Hegel called the ‘prose of the world’: the beauty of the
day-to-day. It is here . . . that we find the true meaning of the
novel.” —Andreas Campomar, The Times Literary Supplement
“A book about love—tender, eccentric and fiercely independent. It
feels a privilege to read it.” —Esther Freud
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |