Go down to the quay at Strandgatan in Stockholm on a summer’s morning and see if you can find a little white ferryboat with the nameSeacrow Ipainted on it. If you find it, just get onboard! At ten o’clock sharp the departure gong will sound because now she is off on her usual route, all the way to the furthest islands in the archipelago. That’s where Seacrow Island is located and that’s where they arrived one day in June – a father and his four children, the Melkerson family …Astrid Lindgren originally wrote Seacrow Island for the Swedish national television broadcaster, SVT. The book was in fact based on the immensely popular TV-series, which also spawned four subsequent films. Astrid found the inspiration for its archipelago setting mainly from her own summerhouse in Furusund.Translator: Evelyn Ramsden
Fact
In 1949, the young German publisher Friedrich Oetinger was in Stockholm to meet the author Gunnar Myrdal. In a bookstore, he happened to hear about Pippi Langstrumpf. The rest is history – he requested a meeting with Astrid Lindgren and obtained a German option for the Pippi trilogy. Verlag Friedrich Oetinger in Hamburg still publishes all of Astrid Lindgren's children's books, and her great popularity in Germany remains intact. The film adaptations of her books were, in several cases, German co-productions, and they are still shown on German TV, especially around Christmas. Several of Astrid Lindgren's songs are very well known in their German translations, such as "Hey Pippi Langstrumpf!".