By Tove Medverkade & Anna-Clara Tidholm
When we ride the train, grandma and I fly past the world outside and the trees want to catch up but they have their roots firmly in the earth. Nobody knows where the train is going, but it never gets lost. It follows the rails and the rails know the way between the trees, over the bridges and through the cities. Grandma is never lost. Her hands are maps of paths and rivers. I hold her hand. I follow her map. Grandfather is in the earth. He sleeps and dreams all the time. But he is never afraid among the roots. We’re never stuck, Grandma and I, because we live and we go by train.
The train to everywhere is a warm story about the closeness between grandmother and child. Soft and calm tempo – nice bedtime story!
The poet Tove Mörkberg is now publishing a picture book together with the experienced illustrator Anna-Clara Tidholm. The girl who is the main character thinks that certain things are boring, like eating breakfast and going to preschool. But there are also things that make life worth living. Dreaming belongs here not to mention riding a train. One day when life feels dull the girl’s grandmother comes by and soon after they are both on a train. One environment after another slips by and nothing is boring and indifferent anymore. In both image and text, this is a poetic picture book that highlights the human need to sometimes leave the boxed-in life and instead venture into the unknown.”
Praise:
“Sitting together and holding hands becomes a contemplation of the whole of existence. Much thanks to the illustrator Anna-Clara Tidholm’s skillful interweaving of fantasy and realism… In addition, Tove Mörkberg writes with ambiguous humor in the micro-details of the prose: The lift goes down, the door opens out… It is noticeable that she is a poet, celebrated among other things for the poetry collection Källarhundarna. Likewise at home in the small child’s ability to trust.”-The Express
“Anna-Clara Tidholm’s everyday illustrations fit perfectly when the Malmö poet Tove Mörkberg describes a child’s cautious yearning for adventure.”-LandskronaPosten
Tove Mörkberg was born and raised in Umeå, but has been living in Malmö for many years. She debuted in 2013 with the poetry collection Barnen.
Anna-Clara Tidholm was born in Stockholm in 1946. She is one of Sweden’s foremost children’s book authors and illustrators and has a varied and rich production behind her. Some examples are “Fairy tales from the forest”, “The father who disappeared” and the Ture books. The Tap! Series has been a great success worldwide and is now considered a toddler classic. Anna-Clara Tidholm has soon received all the prizes that are possible to get. She received the Elsa Beskow plaque in 1986, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1992, the Astrid Lindgren prize in 1997 and the August prize for “Goodbye, Mr. Muffin” in 2002. In the spring of 2012, “Nilla och jag” was published. In recent years, she has published the future classics in the picture book genre: “Okay!”, “Congratulations!”, “Check it out!” and “Come!”. In 2014, she was praised for the illustrations in “Once upon a time there was a fox running in the dark”, written by Thomas Tidholm. In the spring of 2015 came the chapter book “My brother’s name is Noah” which was illustrated by Joanna Hellgren. To Vägen till Mormorsvägen (2018), Anna-Clara has made the pictures and Thomas Tidholm the text.