In Stockholm there will be Pippi at Cirkus, a musical circus produced by Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, with new music from his old collaborator, Benny Andersson. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first Pippi book, and Lindgren’s descendants are pulling out all the stops. Now 85, Nyman admits she has no recollection of coming up with the name, a moment that changed her family’s life for ever. “It was,” Karin Nyman says, “a random name, just plucked out of the air.” But its outlandishness forced her mother to create a character, and Pippi, with her bright orange pigtails, freckles, differently coloured stockings, and hilarious, back-to-front logic, was born. “A story about what?” “A story about Pippi Longstocking.” It was she, the legend goes, who came up with the name Pippi Longstocking while lying in bed, aged seven, sick with pneumonia. “So that is where she told all of her stories me.” Karin Nyman points to a wooden cot, heavily embellished with carved decorations. We meet over a Swedish fika of coffee and biscuits at Lindgren’s Stockholm apartment, a sort of shrine to the writer, kept exactly as it was when she lived here from 1941 until her death in 2002. Astrid Lindgren, the author of the Pippi Longstocking books.
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