Maria (Kristina) Gripe, who published her first work in 1954, established herself in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading Swedish writer in the field of children's and young-adult literature. At the end of the twentieth century she had more than thirty titles in print, many of which have been translated into some twenty different languages. Gripe has been the recipient of many prestigious literary prizes, such as the Scandinavian Nils Holgersson Plaque (1966), the American Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (1967), and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal (1974), issued by the International Board of Books for Young People and often referred to as the Nobel Prize of children's literature.

Maria Kristina Walter was born on 23 July 1923 in the Swedish town of Waxholm in the Stockholm archipelago. She was the eldest of two children in a bourgeois family and received a strict but loving upbringing. Her father, Karl Hugo Walter, was an army...