Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson grew up in a Swedish-speaking family of artists in Helsinki; her father was a sculptor and her mother an illustrator. She studied art in Helsinki, Stockholm and Paris. During the Second World War she drew satirical cartoons of Hitler and Stalin for the magazine Garm.

In 1945 she published the first book about the Moomins, gentle, hippo-like trolls who live in Moominvalley with their many eccentric friends. Further books and a comic strip that appeared in newspapers around the world made the Moomins famous. Behind their cosiness lie themes of loneliness, fear, catastrophe and tolerance. In 1966 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal.

In the 1940s Jansson had a relationship with the theatre director Vivica Bandler; the inseparable Moomin characters Thingumy and Bob, who carry a secret suitcase with a ruby, are said to be based on the two of them. From 1956 her partner was the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, who inspired the character Too-ticky. For decades the two spent their summers on the tiny island of Klovharu in the Gulf of Finland.

In her later novels for adults, such as “Fair Play” (1989), she described the life of two women artists together. She died in Helsinki in 2001, aged 86.