100th Birthday of Tove Jansson

A portrait of Tove Jansson, with her signature "Tove Jansson" and the dates "1914–2001" below. On the left appears the issuing country "FI"; on the right, the year of issue "2014" and the mint mark.

Tove Jansson originally created the Moomins as marginal doodles in her letters — only from 1945, with the novel "The Moomins and the Great Flood" (Swedish: "Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen"), did the characters become a world of their own. The Finland-Swedish author and artist, born in Helsinki in 1914, not only shaped Scandinavian children's literature with her Moomin Valley series but also developed a distinctive visual universe, which she first brought to an international audience as a comic strip for London's "Evening News". Jansson grew up in a family of artists — her father was a sculptor, her mother an illustrator — and studied art in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris. Alongside the Moomin world, she also wrote sophisticated prose for adults, including the widely acclaimed novel "The Sculptor's Daughter", which is strongly autobiographical.

In Finland, Tove Jansson is regarded as one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century; her works have been translated into dozens of languages and have significantly shaped international perceptions of Finnish creativity. For decades, she spent her summers on the small island of Klovharun in the Gulf of Finland — a way of life that deeply influenced her ideas of solitude, nature and freedom. Jansson died in August 2001 in Helsinki. On the artist's 100th birthday, Finland issued a 2-euro commemorative coin in 2014 recalling her artistic life's work.