The illustrator and writer has just returned from an expedition to Antarctica. She spent five weeks here with a group of scientists. “I was asked to tell the story of a melting continent in a way that reaches children. In my case, that is of course a picture book.” Törnqvist’s work is very accessible. Children and adults recognize themselves in her drawings.
Maybe it’s because the child inside her is still very close. “A lot of what I make is autobiographical in a certain way,” says Törnqvist, “I experience something and it gets stuck in my head. For example, in New Orleans I came across a man who was walking with a giant turtle. I then process that in a story, but that story goes its own way. I never know in advance which way it will go.” That story became the book ‘Tortoise and I’, about the friendship between a boy and his turtle, a story about love and death.
A foresight
“It now seems as if I had foresight,” the artist points to the impressive sketches and preliminary studies of the book. “My husband passed away last year and this was his favorite book. He had dementia and at the end of his life he wanted to read it again and again.”
Marit leafs through the sketches: “Look, these drawings didn’t end up in the book at all and these here turned out very different. I thought some drawings were too heavy for the book.”
While she points, she tells about herself: “I was very bullied as a child, that is also in this book. In this drawing you see that the little boy has to sit in a drawn box on the schoolyard. That happened to me too. “You have to sit here, because you look like a monkey,” the children said to me. I still don’t know whether that was because I was from Sweden or just because I was different from the other children.”
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