Lindgren, Astrid
Astrid Lindgren was born and raised in a friendly peasant family. The parents loved each other and their four children very much; they raised them, atypically for that time, gently, without hesitation in showing warm feelings. Perhaps such a happy childhood laid the foundation for the liberal views of the famous writer, which she adhered to throughout her life. She was one of the first to talk about abandoning corporal punishment in education.
“Not violence” - that’s what she called her speech, which she made when she was presented with the Peace Prize. In it, she says that the source of all troubles and wars on earth is also the difficult, anxious childhood of the majority of humanity, and reminded parents that a person learns the world through the one who gives him love.
Surprisingly, they listened to Lindgren’s speech, and Sweden became the first country to ban corporal punishment, and this happened 40 years ago!
The writer had two children, a son and a daughter. Moreover, immediately after birth, she was forced to leave her son in a foster family, since she gave birth to him while still very young, not legally married and did not have money to support the child. I was very worried about this and at the first opportunity I took him in and loved him very much.
Well, thanks to her daughter, Astrid’s fate changed dramatically, because it was her daughter who once asked her to tell her a fairy tale about Pippi Longstocking. The girl just came up with this name, and her mother just started telling stories about the cheerful red-haired girl. And so, the fairy tales I once composed for my own child were published and were so liked by Swedish children that it would simply be dishonest to stop, and Astrid Lindgren continued. During her life, she wrote several dozen children's books, some of them funny and mischievous, some lyrical and touching, some sad and rather gloomy.
It often happens that behind your favorite children's books there is not the most likable personality of the author, but Astrid Lindgren was exactly what we want to see her: sincere, kind, easy-going. Simple and modest, but at the same time smart and influential. Astrid remained very active until the end of her life, and she lived to be 94 years old.
