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Emil – mischievous and loveable
on the 23rd of May 1963, Astrid Lindgren wrote in her diary: “I wrote the first few words about Emil in Lönneberga today”. However, the story had technically begun the year before:
“Emil in Lönneberga. I made that name up myself, and suddenly on a summer’s day in 1962 I shouted it. That was in order to be louder than a little crying three-yearold. He was shouting because he was angry, and when he didn’t want to stop being angry I cried out: ‘Do you know what Emil in Lönneberga did once?’. And then finally he went quiet, because sure enough he wanted to know what Emil in Lönneberga, whoever that might be, had once done. And I started telling him about a terrible boy who put his head in a soup terrine and hoisted his sister up the flag pole. The three-year-old had several fits of shouting that summer and so I came to be pretty well-acquainted with this Emil, who got up to mischief after mischief, just to quieten the loudmouth.”
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Emil has always been my favourite Astrid Lindgren character. To me he symbolises Astrid Lindgren’s view on children – Emil is kind, helpful, independent, a free-spirit, and inventive. Even when things don’t go as planned he still makes the world a better place. Emil was also one of Astrid Lindgren’s personal favourites.
“I loved writing about Emil, and do you know why? Well, because Emil happened to be a child in a world that was almost like the one I lived in myself, when I was little, and just like the one my father had experienced when he was growing up. A world that doesn’t exist anymore. /…/ And I had so much love for Emil, I felt him to be so closely related to my father, who had once, at the end of the last century, been a small, blonde and bare-footed boy in Sevedstorp in Småland, not far from Emil’s Lönneberga.”
The books about Emil are profoundly funny – but they are also stories of courage, morality, empathy, friendship and rebellion. As Jens Andersen wrote in Astrid Lindgren – The Woman behind Pippi Longstocking: “This quiet yet piercing echo in the wake of laughter reminds us of who we are and what we as humans must always remember: to do unto others as we would like others to do unto us.”
cilla nergårdh, CEO, The Astrid Lindgren Company
Content
Emil in Lönneberga / 4–9
Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter / 10–11

Pippi Longstocking / 12–17



Mio, My Son / 18
The Brothers Lionheart / 19
Lotta on Troublemaker Street / 20–21
The Children of Noisy Village / 22–23

Madicken / 24
Kalle Blomkvist – Master Detective / 25
Rasmus and the Vagabond / 25
Karlsson on the Roof / 26
Seacrow Island / 27
Christmas in Småland / 28