Biography

Marit Törnqvist was born in 1964 in Uppsala, Sweden. She moved to the Netherlands at the age of five. She studied illustration at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Today, she is a celebrated illustrator and children’s book writer, and her oeuvre has many highlights.

Törnqvist made her debut as an illustrator with a picture book for Astrid Lindgren, which marked the start of a long collaboration with Lindgren and a series of other writers. For example, she made the iconic illustrations of the collectionYou are the sweetest by Hans and Monique Hagen, of which three hundred thousand copies have been sold since its publication in 2000. She also received the Golden Brush for Pikkuhenki‘s illustrations, with text by Toon Tellegen.

In 1995, Törnqvist made her debut as a writer with the book Small story about love, for which she was awarded a Silver Stylus. Since then, writing has become an increasingly important part of her work. For this, she has received the Silver Stylus twice in recent years, for The Island of Happiness (2018) and Turtle and Me (2023).

Törnqvist has joined exhibitions and has won prizes all over the world. In 2021, she received the IBBY i-Read Outstanding Reading Promoter Award for her efforts in the field of reading promotion. In 2025, she was nominated for the 17^th time for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the ‘Nobel Prize’ in children’s literature. Törnqvist was also the designer of a three-dimensional journey through Astrid Lindgren’s books at the Junibacken Children’s Museum in Stockholm, which now welcomes millions of visitors.

In recent years, Törnqvist has broadened her horizons and initiated numerous international book projects for refugee children around the world. She has been closely involved for decades in the Iranian book promotion project Read with Me, which focuses on the most vulnerable children in the country. She also guides a dozen Iranian illustrators in making their picture books.

In 2017, she compiled an anthology of Dutch children’s literature translated into Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Somali, Tigrynia and Kurdish under the title A book for you, of which ten thousand copies were distributed in asylum seeker centres as a welcome gift to children in their own language.

In addition to illustrating and writing, Törnqvist regularly stands on the barricades for asylum seekers and minors struggling. With her art installation The big loss, she spent three days outside the parliament of Stockholm in 2022 around World Refugee Day to put the abuses within Swedish asylum policy on the agenda and published various opinion pieces in major Swedish newspapers.

In order to give a voice to children in the economically disadvantaged and politically neglected Nydala district in Malmö, Sweden, experiencing major problems with the recruitment of minors by gangs, Törnqvist initiated a pilot project in this district in 2023. Under professional guidance, eleven-year-olds have written and illustrated a book about their own lives, which can be borrowed from all Malmö libraries.

 In addition to the various drawing, writing and reading projects with children, Törnqvist is always busy creating a new picture book. Writing and drawing is a way for her to find peace in the harsh and sometimes chaotic world.

Marit Törnqvist’s books have been translated into thirty languages. Törnqvist lives in the Netherlands and Sweden.