Elsa Beskow

Elsa Beskow (1874–1953) was a Swedish children’s author and illustrator whose luminous watercolor pictures of fairies, elves, woodland children, and the changing seasons have introduced more than a century of children to the gentle imaginative world that Waldorf education prizes. Born in Stockholm on 11 February 1874, she studied art at the Tekniska skolan and began illustrating for the children’s magazine Jultomten in 1894 — at age twenty.

In 1897 she married Nathaniel Beskow, and over the next two decades raised six sons while sustaining the family on the income from her books — a new picture book each year. Across her fifty-year career she wrote and illustrated some forty titles, including Children of the Forest, Peter in Blueberry Land, Pelle’s New Suit, Around the Year, Tale of the Little Little Old Woman, and the beloved Aunt Green, Aunt Brown, and Aunt Lavender series — books in which the everyday world of small children meets the elves, goblins, and talking creatures of Swedish folk tradition without strain.

Beskow received the Nils Holgersson Plaque from the Swedish Library Association in 1952; after her death in 1953, the Swedish Library Association established the Elsa Beskow Award in her honor, given annually to the year’s best Swedish picture-book illustrator. She remains Sweden’s best-loved children’s-book illustrator, and her books have been the imaginative inheritance of generations of Waldorf families.