“No princesses, adventures and spacemen! No fancy pictures and, above all, no pretty fibs! I want to tell true stories about real people, just the way we behave in everyday life.
Mini-dramas on the psychological level. Mischief, missing a friend, being frightened of ghosts, getting into fights, Christmas being over … The sort of thing that any child can recognize.
But, preferably, there should also be something unreal, unexpected!
For in the midst of everyday life we also have: astonishment, terror, a sudden paroxysm of laughter and Eternal Questions. We adults have mostly forgotten that kind of thing, pre-occupied as we are with paying rent, bringing home food and doing our duty: forgotten that life is an incomparable enigma! Full of possibilities. The things we get into! Things we never thought we were capable of! And while wars are fought, computers are invented and people have babies … the seasons of the year are performing their perpetual cycle, over and over again as they have been doing for thousands of years past …
It’s incomprehensible!
Reality is fairytale enough. Each day is new. Children understand this best. It’s we adults who have forgotten. I want to tell stories so that children and adults will be reminded and can laugh and be amazed together.
Children who are charged with reality and with the magic of reality are more amply equipped.
Other decisions can be made, stronger contenders conted and more affectionate spirit can be created – when youngsters one day become the people in power. Or “simply” parents … ”
Gunilla Bergström Auther to the books about Alfie Atkins / Alfons Åberg
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