As a children’s author, I often get asked which books I liked as a child. It’s a question that makes you think about your youth and the books you liked, and how they revealed your innate character, even though you weren’t aware of it at the time, helping to fashion the you you are now.



I liked the offbeat, the outlandish and the unconventional, which was telling. I liked playful language and absurd humour – also telling – and I loved travel: from the age of seven, I spent most nights losing myself and planning my future in the pages of a children’s encyclopaedia of the world. And because I liked all these things, my greatest fictional inspiration is Pippi Longstocking.

Emma Shevah: ‘Pippi has done what I longed to do’. Photograph: PR

I realise now that the child captivated by the atlas was hungry for freedom, adventure and independence, and Pippi, at nine years old, has it all. She’s financially sorted thanks to her bag of gold coins. She has a monkey that sits on her shoulder and a horse that lives in her porch. She’s free of humdrum routines like school and homework, and is completely self-sufficient. Thinking her mother looks down at her through a hole in heaven, Pippi waves and says, “Don’t worry. I can look after myself.” And she can.

Notably, Pippi has done what I longed to do: she’s travelled the world and has a story to tell from each of the countries she’s visited. Not that you can believe any of them. Truth, like most things where she’s involved, is a little more adaptable than it is for the rest of us. After all, “how can you expect a little child whose mother is an angel and whose father is a Cannibal King and who has spent her life sailing the seas to tell the truth always?”

Astrid Lindgren, creator of Pippi Longstocking. Photograph: PR

To highlight Pippi’s nonconformity, Astrid Lindgren sets her in the world we know. Her friends, Tommy and Annika, are “very good and well-brought up and obedient”. They go to school, toe the line and respect authority figures. Pippi, on the other hand, is a little anarchist.

What I didn’t realise then is that she’s also a feminist, an optimist and a free thinker. We could all do with being a little more like her. She doesn’t get angry or offended even when she’s insulted. She’s happy with who she is and what she looks like. It’s not awful but “really rather nice” that she doesn’t have parents because there’s “no one to tell her to go to bed just when she’s having the most fun and no one to make her take cod liver oils when she felt like eating peppermints”. She’s generous, champions the downtrodden and amuses her sick friends by doing acrobatics at their window, hugging them and even the wrapping paper when they give her a present.

When she does go to school, it’s only so she too can experience the holidays, but she can’t meet up at eight because she “can’t start that early”. She leaves home at ten on her horse, gallops wildly into schoolyard, ties him up and crashes into the classroom where – in typical good humour – she challenges the teacher, then draws on the floor because it’s a picture of a horse and it won’t fit on her piece of paper.

And that’s Pippi. She can’t be confined to a small space – not on paper and not in life because her worldview is bigger than that. Nothing fazes her - not being on her own, not ghosts, and not authority figures trying to make her something she isn’t. She’s strong, yes: she can carry her horse and throw sharks around, but her strength lies deeper than that. She has an unshakeable sense of well being, her own take on the world and an enthusiasm for life that’s infectious.

So when Tommy says, “You really can’t be certain about anything when it comes to Pippi!” he nails what I loved best about her. In a world of expectations, rules and responsibilities, Pippi - with wit and charm - embodies freedom, originality and the unexpected. As a child, I aspired to be just like her. And, to tell you the truth, I still do.

Emma Shevah’s first novel, Dream on, Amber was published by Chicken House in March 2014. Her second, Dara Palmer’s Major Drama, is out now in paperback. Buy it at the Guardian bookshop. Find out more about Emma Shevah and her books.