Babbis Friis-Baastad (née Blauenfeldt; 27 August 1921 – 10 January 1970) was a Norwegian

children's writer Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...

Personal life

Friis-Baastad was born in

Bergen Bergen (, ) is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county on the Western Norway, west coast of Norway. Bergen is the list of towns and cities in Norway, second-largest city in Norway after the capital Oslo. By May 20 ...

on 27 August 1921, to Carl Heinrich Blauenfeldt and Edel Johanne Mønness, and grew up in

Oslo Oslo ( or ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of 1,064,235 in 2022 ...

as an

only child An only child is a person with no siblings, by birth or adoption. Overview Throughout history, only-children were relatively uncommon. From around the middle of the 20th century, birth rates and average family sizes fell sharply for a number of ...

. She passed

examen artium Examen artium was the name of the academic certification conferred in Denmark and Norway, qualifying the student for admission to university studies. Examen artium was originally introduced as the entrance exam of the University of Copenhagen in 1 ...

in 1940, and subsequently commercial school, and then started studying philology. Her studies were eventually aborted due to marriage, child birth and fleeing to Sweden from the

German occupation of Norway The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany during the Second World War began on 9 April 1940 after Operation Weserübung. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on 10 June 1940, and Nazi Germany controlled Norway until th ...

. She married pilot Kaare Friis-Baastad in 1942, and they had a total of four children.

Career

From 1953 on Friis-Baastad contributed to the children's radio shows ''

Lørdagsbarnetimen ''Lørdagsbarnetimen'' ("The Saturday Children's Hour") was a children's radio programme produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and broadcast every Saturday from 20 December 1924 until 11 September 2010 with a forced interruptio ...

'' and ''Barnetimen for de minste'', writing sketches and audio plays. Her best known of these works is the series ''Tulutta og Makronelle'', which saw several reprises and was published in book format in 1960. Her first children's book was ''Æresord'' from 1959, which was also translated into English, Dutch and Swedish. Further books are ''Kjersti'' (1962), ''Ikke ta Bamse'' (1964), ''Du må våkne, Tor!'' (1967), ''Hest på ønskelisten'' (1968), which was translated and published in the US in 1972 (with the English title ''Wanted! A horse!''), and ''Hest i sentrum'' (1969). ''Ikke ta Bamse'', translated 1967 into English as ''Don't take Teddy'', is about an

intellectually disabled Intellectual disability (ID), also known as general learning disability (in the United Kingdom), and formerly mental retardation (in the United States), Rosa's Law, Pub. L. 111-256124 Stat. 2643(2010).Archive is a generalized neurodevelopmental ...

boy, viewed from the perspective of his younger brother Mikkel. In 1969 the publisher

Charles Scribner's Sons Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City that has published several notable American authors, including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjori ...

received the

Mildred L. Batchelder Award The Mildred L. Batchelder Award, or Batchelder Award, is an American Library Association literary award that annually recognizes the publisher of the year's "most outstanding" children's book translated into English-language, English and published ...

for the translation of ''Don't take Teddy'', thereby labeled the year's "most outstanding" children's book translated into

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

and published in the US. The book received the

Lewis Carroll Shelf Award The Lewis Carroll Shelf Award was an American literary award conferred on several books by the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education annually from 1958 to 1979. Award-winning books were deemed to "belong on the same shelf" as ''Al ...

in 1976.

Awards and legacy

Three of Friis-Baastad's books were awarded the from the publishing house Damm, and she received several prizes from the Ministry of Culture for her children's books.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Friis-Baastad, Babbis 1921 births 1970 deaths Politicians from Bergen Norwegian children's writers Norwegian expatriates in Sweden