Ulf Stark
I grew up in Stureby, a suburb of Stockholm, with a dentist father and a housewife mother and a brother who was two years stronger than me. When I was little Mum used to read to us in the evenings. That’s how I came into contact with the great adventures. Babar tramped around in our sitting-room. Biggles flew among the cut-glass chandeliers. And the snake Kaa turned into a shower hose. It all made my childhood suburban life more exciting.
I didn’t start writing until I was a teenager. In connection with puberty when everything became so different. Often the teenage years are described as an inferno of drunkenness, uncertainty and unhappy love. For me it was a time of intellectual expansion. I read the classics, poetry, trash, philosophy and novels in the night. I slept my way through school. I learnt a lot. I wrote my first book when I was 19, a collection of poetry entitled An Opening to Life. I continued with another couple of books for adults. After that I didn’t know what to write. I needed to earn some money. I became a bureaucrat.
But I was still longing for those fantasy worlds. Thenin 1984 I wrote a book called Dårfinkar och dönickar (Loonies and Phonies), full of the joy of writing, inspired by an announcement about a competition for the best book for children and young people. My book won the competition and in the course of time it became a television series, which made it possible for me to gradually stop bureaucratising and devote myself full-time to writing.
Since then there have been a whole heap of books. Picture books like The Jaguar, Can You Whistle Johanna, When dad Showed Me the Universe, A Star called Ajax, and most recently Hello, In There! Or What an Unborn Child Should Know. Reading books such as Let the Polar Bears Dance, My Friend Percy’s Magic Gym Shoes, My Friend the Sheik in Stureby and My Friend Percy, Buffalo Bill and I.
Why, then, do I, who always publish my books in Sweden, have a book published by Söderströms in Finland?
Because I’m so HAPPY to produce a book in collaboration with Linda Bondestam.
Praises:
Ulf Stark is one of the greatest Swedish storytellers, an Astrid Lindgren of our time.
With Bondestam as illustrator of Stark’s verses, the result is a series of richly patterned collages in which the composition of every picture is minutely balanced, which makes reading the book a harmonious aesthetic experience.
–Mia Österlund, Hufvudstadsbladet
Ulf Stark is a Swedish author who has a gift for writing from a child’s perspective. That is something he achieves extremely well in this book too. And also without any moralising…
Linda Bondestam belongs to the especially gifted young generation of illustrators in Finland. Her colourful and highly detailed pictures, created in collage, enhance the text and add extra dimensions to the story.
–Lisbeth Rosenback, Vasabladet
The Dictator is the title of a new picture book about a tiny boy who uses his whole hand to point with. He’s only a hand’s breadth tall but is dressed in a respect-commanding uniform. He goes to his day-nursery in his miniature tank of a pram, driven by his “private chauffeur”, his mum. In the evening his parents, attired as housemaid and butler, serve him his milk and bring him his pyjamas. One can guess what they are: a pair of genuine overindulgent parents. It becomes highly amusing when Ulf Stark’s and Linda Bondestam’s brilliantly illustrated tale transfers the dictator’s classic accessories and behaviour to the overindulged child of today.
– Sverker Lenas, Dagens Nyheter
The Dictator is a many-faceted story which the adult can interpret in a lot of ways the child cannot. Ulf Stark writes a story that is both serious and humorous… [Linda Bondestam] extends the text in a charming way and creates a imaginative and colourful book with clear colours, in which all the time there are things happening in the pictures.
–Dag Hedberg, BTJ
Written by Ulf Stark | Illustrated by Linda Bondestam
The Dictator
Rights sold: Finnish, Belarusian, Danish, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian, Russian
Dictators are people who only want to write “I, I, I”, who think it’s hard work always having to make decisions and all the time having to check that the sun rises and the moon goes down. Dictators must not be kissed. “There’s a lot to think about when you’re a dictator. He thinks of himself.”
Dictators may be children of overindulgent parents, they can be artists or past rulers of the Soviet Union. But in the end they all become quite lonely.
Ulf Stark is one of Sweden’s best, best-loved and most multifaceted authors of children’s books. He tells the story of a little dictator with humour and sensitivity. Finland-Swedish illustrator Linda Bondestam and Swedish author Ulf Stark have worked together to produce wholly new sparks of genius. A revolutionary picture book.
Praise:
The Dictator is an empathetic, very amusing, intelligent tale. This pearl of a picture book has a moral but is liberating enough, with no rigid commandments.
–Ylva Larsdotter, Ny Tid
Elina Ahlbäck Literary Agency Oy Ltd.
info(at)ahlbackagency.com | +358 400 512 101 | www.ahlbackagency.com | Korkeavuorenkatu 37, FI-00130 Helsinki, Finland
