Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was a Finnish writer and artist who wrote in Swedish.

She was born into a bohemian family: her mother was the prominent artist Signe Hammarsten, a book illustrator, and her father was the acclaimed sculptor Viktor Jansson. Tove was the first child in the family. Her brother Per Olov would later become a photographer, and another brother, Lars, an artist.

On her mother’s side, Tove belonged to the old Swedish Hammarsten family, which produced many prominent statesmen and other famous people. Interestingly, Jansson, who mentioned her mother frequently in books and interviews, spoke very little about her father. Much is known about her Swedish relatives and almost nothing about her Finnish relatives on her father’s side. As a child, Tove spent every summer in Sweden with her grandmother in the village of Blidö, near Stockholm. “The most wonderful thing was that the sea was very close. And although it could not be seen from the lawn by the house where we played with friends, if we suddenly grew quiet during our games, we could hear the sound of the surf,” Tove recalled.

At 15, Jansson left to study in Sweden. After receiving a degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Swedish Academy of Arts, she trained at art schools in France, Germany, and Italy. By that time she had already achieved a certain degree of recognition at home, since from almost the age of 10 she had been making illustrations for a popular children’s magazine whose editor-in-chief was a close acquaintance of her parents.

After completing her studies abroad, Tove returned home and began illustrating books and drawing caricatures on commission for various publications.

Jansson’s world fame came thanks to the book series about the Moomins: charming creatures living in the idyllic Moominvalley. These books, for which Jansson did the illustrations herself, broke all records for popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. They sold in millions of copies and were published all over the world. For example, “The Magician’s Hat” alone was translated into 34 languages, including Japanese, Thai, and Persian.

Altogether, Jansson wrote 8 novels about the Moomins (“The Little Trolls and the Great Flood,” “