Tove Jansson Adult Fiction - Rights & Brands

Originally published in Swedish in 2017 504 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1996 103 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 2017 201 pages

Essays & Quotes

The Boulevard and other texts

Bulevarden och andra texter

A Gift of Words

These observations, taken from the island of Klovharun and illustrated by Tuulikki Pietilä, cover all aspects of Tove’s and Tuulikki’s time in the Finnish archipelago – including their eventual decision to stop spending summers on the island.

Tove Jansson had a passion for art, life, love – and a gift for words. This beautiful book contains selected quotes by Tove, spanning her entire literary output. Tove’s words will inspire readers of all ages, offering hope, courage, comfort and joy in equal measure

Anteckningar från en ö

Originally published in Swedish in 1965 80 pages

Fifteen unknown short stories and illustrated essays that were published in various papers are compiled here for the first time to add another dimension to Tove Jansson’s multifaceted work.

Some of the texts reflect Tove’s views on 1930s Europe, written during her time spent in Paris, Dresden and Verona.

Notes from an Island

Sanojen lahja

© Moomin Characters™

Contact Uudenmaankatu 8, 00120 Helsinki, Finland

Moomin Comics The Moomin comics were originally created

by Tove Jansson for The Evening News in London, the world’s biggest newspaper at that time.

The comic was commissioned in the 1950s, and first Tove, later also her brother, Lars Jansson, produced the Moomins’ adventures daily for over 20 years. The comics were syndicated to 120 newspapers in over 40 countries, reaching more than 20 million daily readers.

The comics have now been collected and published in 10 chronological black-and-white volumes.

Drawn & Quarterly has extracted single-story adventures from the albums and carefully coloured them according to Tove’s original palette.

Tove Jansson

Happiness: A Book for Lovers Vi: en romantsik bok för älskande

These observations, taken from the island of Klovharun and illustrated by Tuulikki Pietilä, cover all aspects of Tove’s and Tuulikki’s time in the Finnish archipelago – including their eventual decision to stop spending summers on the island.

Augustendalsvägen 51 131 52 Nacka, Sweden – info@rightsandbrands.com www.rightsandbrands.com – rightsandbrands rightsandbrands

“Tove Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

— Philip Pullman Tove Jansson, Finnish-Swedish writer and artist, was born in Helsinki in 1914 to a sculptor father and an artist mother. She grew up in a bohemian and creative family who were part of the Swedish-speaking Finnish minority.

Tove soon proved herself to be a natural artist, having her first drawing published at the age of 15 in Garm, a liberal anti-fascist magazine. Tove became one of Finland’s most notable young artists in the 1930s and 1940s, admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, illustrator and later also as a cartoonist.

Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomins, a collection of stories written and illustrated between 1945 and 1970.

The Moomin books have been translated into more than 50 languages and remain in print all over the world today. But Moomins only count for a part of Tove’s literary output; she went

on to write a series of classic novels and short stories to establish herself as Scandinavia’s best loved author to date.

Tove Jansson’s work reflects the tenets of her life: her love of family, of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. “Work and love” was the motto she chose for herself, and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising.

An important place for both Tove and her works was the island of Klovharun in the Pellinki archipelago, where she spent summers with her lifelong partner, the artist and professor Tuulikki Pietilä. During her career, Tove Jansson was awarded several important prizes, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Swedish Academy Award and the Finnish Award for State Literature three times. Her novels and short stories have been translated into over 30 languages.

In recent decades, Tove’s work has enjoyed a true revival in several countries. Contemporary authors have referred to her as an inspiration, including Ali Smith and Esther Freud who have both written introductions to English-language editions of her books.

The Summer Book to become an Englishlanguage film The UK film adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book is scheduled to be shot in Finland in the summers of 2019 and 2020. It will be directed by Marc Munden and produced by Kevin Loader’s Free Range Films.

Originally published in Swedish in 1972 160 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1989 152 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1971 192 pages

“A wonderful archipelago of stories.”

- The Independent

Originally published in Swedish in 1968 192 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1978 208 pages

Short stories

Originally published in Swedish in 1982 208 pages

Novels

“How lightly Tove Jansson’s fiction traverses the wide world. How profoundly it implicates us.” – Ali Smith

The Summer Book

Fair Play

The True Deceiver

The Listener

A Sculptor’s Daughter

The Doll’s House

An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter Sophia spend the summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. They wander the island, having philosophical conversations of all kinds, talking about death, or how best to dive into water. They fight. They curse. They have adventures, building things and breaking into the new summer house on a neighbouring island, outraged that the businessman who built it doesn’t leave the door open. Written with clarity, brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a fresh, vivid and magical novel about seemingly endless summers of discovery.

Through a series of vignettes, we look in on the lives of two female artists, Mari and Jonna, who live on opposite sides of an apartment building, separated by an attic. They are each other’s closest friend, greatest critic, and lover. We encounter them lost in a fog, vacationing on a remote Finnish island, fishing, feeding the cat, or simply rearranging photos on a wall.

Snow has been falling on the village all winter long, and there is little to do but trade tales.

Everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, ventures out from her large, empty house only in spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. Anna has something Katri wants - and by the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict that threatens the equilibrium of the whole village.

The Listener was the first of Tove Jansson’s books to be published after the death of her mother, the point at which she declared the Moomin series over. This collection of short stories is different from Tove’s previous work; fragmentary, starting and stopping in the middle of things. Fascinatingly, the illustrator Edward Gorey appears in one of the stories saying: “It’s the unexpressed that interests me ... it’s a mistake to clarify everything.” This seems to aptly describe Tove’s writing.

Tove Jansson’s first book for adults captures her childhood memories, as she grew up in an early-twentieth-century Helsinki that was getting used to independence from Russian rule.

This atmospheric book is filled with sharp observations on the mysteries of winter ice, the bonhomie of balaika parties, and the limitless excitement of Christmas viewed from beneath the tree. While Tove learns a lot from her father, her identity as a writer is formed partly in opposition to him — especially when it comes to the subject of women and art.

A collection of twelve short stories about obsession and ambition. Witty, sharp and often disquieting, these stories explore human nature and the way in which mysteries and uncertainty—even illness and danger—can have positive and magical potential. The stories share a recurring theme: what happens when artists and eccentrics, who hide away in the back corners of middle-class society, try to change their already difficult relationship with the world?

Tove’s whimsical yet philosophical prose about human generosity and respect perfectly echoes her signature subjects: work and love.

“The great benefit of reading Fair Play is that one enters into the same arrangement, becoming privy to two lifetimes’ worth of shared wonder.”

— World Literature Today

Lyssnerskan

Den ärliga bedragaren

Tove’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel works almost like a quiet psychological thriller: nothing much happens on the surface but the undercurrents are fierce and dangerous.

Bildhuggarens dotter

Dockskåpet

“Tove Jansson was one of the 20th century’s most brilliant, enigmatic prose writers.”

— Boston Globe

“Even Jansson’s loneliest, craggiest stories have a kind of fierce beauty to them, (coming from) simple contrasts and contradictions: the introvert who also wants a connection with his fellows; the storm gathering outside even as coffee simmers on the stovetop. This is the beauty of the ordinary, and it can be very beautiful indeed.“

— Book Reviews

Originally published in Swedish in 1998 303 pages

“Eccentric, funny, wise, full of joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.”

—Esther Freud

Rent spel

Originally published in Swedish in 1991 175 pages

Sommarboken

Originally published in Swedish in 1987 224 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1974 160 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1984 108 pages

“One of Jansson’s most deceptively quiet, most astonishing compositions.”

— Ali Smith

Sun City

The Field of Stones

This novella, about the inhabitants of a Florida retirement home, hints at the dark reality found behind a utopian vision. Alienation, abandonment and ageing foreshadow the spectre of death – with some people simply choosing to ignore it.

Solstaden

Stenåkern

Travelling Light

Resa med lätt bagage

Letters from Klara

A recently retired journalist leaves the city to spend the summer in the country with his two daughters. Tasked with writing the biography of the unpleasant ‘Y’, he soon finds his chronicle of this character’s life morphing into his own family’s troubled story. The darkness that surfaces is handled with Tove’s distinct humour and lightness of touch.

A collection of twelve short stories about journeys of different kinds: some inward, some outward, all with complicated, unpredictable characters observing their surroundings as travellers, or with the unfettered gaze of a child.

Tove’s signature deftness of touch and imagination gives these stories a duality between light and darkness.

In this nimble, beautifully-crafted yet disquieting collection of stories, Tove Jansson explores the complicated games and relationships between people, writing from the perspective of a bewildered young artist, a resilient child or an irascible elderly correspondent. Discomfiting encounters and periods of isolation can span decades, generations even. A simple letter can reveal as much of the sender as the receiver, and how easy it can be to misunderstand one another.

“The touch of her pen recalls that of a watercolour.”

—The Short Review

Brev från Klara

Messages: A selection of short stories Meddelande

A marvellous collection of Tove Jansson’s prose, spanning most of the twentieth century and scattered with insights into beauty found in the everyday. Messages features several stories from A Sculptor’s Daughter as well as Tove’s later story collections.

Originally published in Finnish in 2017 504 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 1996 103 pages

Originally published in Swedish in 2017 201 pages

Essays & Quotes

The Boulevard and other texts

Bulevarden och andra texter

A Gift of Words

These observations, taken from the island of Klovharun and illustrated by Tuulikki Pietilä, cover all aspects of Tove’s and Tuulikki’s time in the Finnish archipelago – including their eventual decision to stop spending summers on the island.

Tove Jansson had a passion for art, life, love – and a gift for words. This beautiful book contains selected quotes by Tove, spanning her entire literary output. Tove’s words will inspire readers of all ages, offering hope, courage, comfort and joy in equal measure

Anteckningar från en ö

Originally published in Swedish in 1965 80 pages

Fifteen unknown short stories and illustrated essays that were published in various papers are compiled here for the first time to add another dimension to Tove Jansson’s multifaceted work.

Some of the texts reflect Tove’s views on 1930s Europe, written during her time spent in Paris, Dresden and Verona.

Notes from an Island

Moomin Comics The Moomin comics were originally created

by Tove Jansson for The Evening News in London, the world’s biggest newspaper at that time.

The comic was commissioned in the 1950s, and first Tove, later also her brother, Lars Jansson, produced the Moomins’ adventures daily for over 20 years. The comics were syndicated to 120 newspapers in over 40 countries, reaching more than 20 million daily readers.

The comics have now been collected and published in 10 chronological black-and-white volumes.

Drawn & Quarterly has extracted single-story adventures from the albums and carefully coloured them according to Tove’s original palette.

There are 10 black-and-white Moomin comic collections and 15 coloured single story adventures available.

Sanojen lahja

Contact

Happiness: A Book for Lovers Vi: en romantsik bok för älskande

This recently rediscovered and carefully restored gift book is for lovers and their memories. Featuring illustrations by Signe ”Ham” Hammarsten Jansson, Tove’s mother, this is the perfect gift for weddings, anniversaries and treasured moments.

info@rightsandbrands.com www.rightsandbrands.com –

Tove Jansson “Tove Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

— Philip Pullman

rightsandbrands rightsandbrands – Uudenmaankatu 8, 00120 Helsinki, Finland Augustendalsvägen 51 131 52 Nacka, Sweden

Tove Jansson, Finnish-Swedish writer and artist, was born in Helsinki in 1914 to a sculptor father and an artist mother. She grew up in a bohemian and creative family who were part of the Swedish-speaking Finnish minority.

Tove soon proved herself to be a natural artist, having her first drawing published at the age of 15 in Garm, a liberal anti-fascist magazine. Tove became one of Finland’s most notable young artists in the 1930s and 1940s, admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, illustrator and later also as a cartoonist.

Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomins, a collection of stories written and illustrated between 1945 and 1970. The Moomins books have been translated into more than 50 languages and remain

in print all over the world today. But Moomins only count for a part of Tove’s literary output; she went on to write a series of classic novels and short stories to establish herself as Scandinavia’s best loved author to date.

Tove Jansson’s work reflects the tenets of her life: her love of family, of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. “Work and love” was the motto she chose for herself, and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising.

An important place for both Tove and her works was the island of Klovharun in the Pellinki archipelago, where she spent summers with her lifelong partner, the artist and professor Tuulikki Pietilä.

During her career, Tove Jansson was awarded several important prizes, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Swedish Academy Award and the Finnish Award for State Literature three times. Her works have been translated into over 30 languages.

In recent decades, Tove’s work has enjoyed a true revival in several countries. Contemporary authors have referred to her as an inspiration, including Ali Smith and Esther Freud who have both written introductions to English-language editions of her books.

The Summer Book to become an Englishlanguage film The UK film adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book is scheduled to be shot in Finland in the summers of 2019 & 2020. It will be directed by Marc Munden and produced by Kevin Loader’s Free Range Films.