Tove Jansson: Beyond the Moomins
On the occasion of a new retrospective, Simon Willis writes: ‘Born in Finland, Jansson (1914–2001) contributed her first illustrations to Garm magazine as a precocious fifteen-year-old, and alongside her magazine work she developed a successful career as a painter. Then, in 1945, she published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first in a series of nine children’s books about a family of hippo-like creatures living in Moominvalley, a place of forests and rivers on the coast of Finland. The books, in which Jansson intersperses her stories with simple line drawings of the Moomins and their adventures, have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold over fifteen million copies, in addition to which Jansson drew a Moomin cartoon strip syndicated to
120 newspapers around the world. The popularity of the Moomins spawned an empire of television shows, films, and theme parks, as well as all manner of merchandise from plastic toys to crockery.’
