THROUGHOUT THEIR CAREER AS children’s book creators, Inger and Lasse Sandberg expressed a unique presence in the world of children, combining word magic and the joy of being together with a playful pictorial language adapted for children without losing artistic expressiveness or creative imagination. Little Anna debuted in picture book form in 1964 and has become one of their most popular and classic creations.

© Tre Sandberg AB

Little Anna is a girl who likes to do things herself. She likes to build things and to decide things. When needed she is helped by her good friend The Tall Uncle. And Anna helps him when he mislays his hat or his magic peephole. The Anna character was originally created for a doll's house in the Sandberg family - the very small heroine of a very small book made out of business cards – and was further developed in a 1957 issue of the classic children's magazine Tuff & Tuss, but the real breakthrough took place with the book Vad Anna fick se (What Anna saw) in 1964.

The first Anna book made creative use of the repetitive and additive storytelling of the traditional children's rhyme, but in a modern manner well suited to the graphic playfulness of Lasse Sandberg's art. While Anna is a little girl, her friend The Tall Uncle is so tall that he doesn't fit onto the book pages, but has to wind his body over and between the pages. Several Anna books followed throughout the years, the last one published in 2008. The Anna books vary in content but all focus on children's own participation in the world, their observations and activities.

Inger and Lasse Sandberg's first book together was Ullrik the sheep receives a medal and the couple have themselves received numerous awards throughout the years - the Heffaklump in 1969, the Nils Holgersson plaquette in 1973, the Astrid Lindgren Award in 1974 and the royal medal Litteris et Artibus, awarded for outstanding service to the arts, in 2006. They have also both been members of the Swedish Academy for Children's Books.

As picture book creators, Inger and Lasse Sandberg came to further develop the modernistic poetic-pedagogic picture book tradition developed in Denmark in the 1940s by artists like Arne Ungermann and Mogens Hertz. Inger Sandberg (1930-), originally a school teacher, carefully adapts her storylines to the tastes and needs of modern children, stimulating them to creativity, playfulness and discovery. A graduate from Beckmans school of arts (today Beckmans College of Design), Lasse Sandberg (1924-2008) began his career as a newspaper cartoonist under the pen name "Herr Sandberg" in publications like the classic satire magazine Sondagsnisse-Strix and the weekly magazine Vi. His picture book characters are prototypes for children to identify themselves with, often personified through attributes from Inger Sandberg's text. The main purpose of the illustrations is to enlighten the storylines from the perspective of a child. His naivistic character drawing style is often accompanied by complex backgrounds and environments in different techniques like ink, crayon, oil and collage utilizing materials like tapestry, laces, passementerie, ribbons, scraps, cut-outs, textile remnants and golden paper.