20 years since the death of Astrid Lindgren

To honour her life-long engagement in children’s rights issues, The Astrid Lindgren Company is proud to enter into a long-term collaboration with Save the Children.

Twenty years ago, around noon on the 28th of January 2002, it was announced that Astrid Lindgren had passed away that morning. Throughout the day and into the evening people gathered outside Astrid’s apartment building at Dalagatan 46 in Stockholm, leaving flowers or lighting candles by the front door. On the 8th of March around 100,000 people lined the streets of Stockholm for her funeral procession.

The fight for every child’s right to love and safety runs as an unbroken and consistent thread through Astrid Lindgren’s entire work and life. Her acceptance speech for the German Booksellers Award in 1978, ‘Never Violence!’, has become legendary and contributed to Sweden being the first country to prohibit all corporal punishment against children by law in 1979. To commemorate her work not just an author but as an advocate of human rights, The Astrid Lindgren Company is now entering into a long-time collaboration with Save the Children, with the aim to collect funds for their projects together with licensing partners.

“For Save the Children, this cooperation feels just right. Astrid Lindgren was a true fighter for children’s rights and her characters mean so much for so many children – in Sweden and all over the world. With this as a foundation, we hope and believe we will be able to make a difference for even more children”
-Helena Thybell, Secretary General, Save the Children Sweden

”Astrid Lindgren is a person that people still listen to, even though she is no longer with us. With this cooperation, we want to and try to do good, in a way that we think that is in line with what she herself would have wished for.”
-Cilla Nergårdh, CEO, The Astrid Lindgren Company

ASTRID LINDGREN QUOTES

"We all desire peace. So is there any possibility at all of our changing fundamentally, before it’s too late? Of our learning to distance ourselves from violence? Of our trying quite simply to become a new kind of human beings? But how could we go about that, and where should we start? I believe that we should start from the bottom. With the children."
(Astrid Lindgren, ’Never Violence!’, 1978)

“Then he folded himself across a chair and cried quietly. Without making a noise, as if he realised that it didn’t matter anyway, they’ll do what they like with me. Those tears still cry within me and I suppose will continue to do so until I die. Perhaps it’s because of those tears that I’ve always been so quick to take the child’s side in any circumstance…”
(Astrid Lindgrens notes for a biography in 1976-1977. She had to leave her son Lasse with foster parents in Denmark when he was born in 1926. When he was three years old, the foster mother became ill and Astrid had to bring Lasse home with her. He had come to regard the family in Denmark as his own and was devastated when he realised that he would not return to them.)

“Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.”
(Astrid Lindgren, in the magazine Husmodern, 1948)

About The Astrid Lindgren Company

Astrid Lindgren’s children and grandchildren own The Astrid Lindgren Company. There are currently 16 people employed by the company, most of whom are experts in different fields of copyright. We are based in Stockholm, but our work covers the globe. The foundation on which our work is built is the love of Astrid Lindgren and her work. We are convinced that the world needs Astrid Lindgren – perhaps now more than ever before.

About Save the Children
As the world’s largest independent child rights organisation, Save the Children can act where children need us the most – in Sweden and around the world. By focusing on sustainable, long-term efforts, we make both immediate and lasting impacts in children’s lives. In other words – we make the world a better place for children, every day.