The Bridge: Featuring Eva Lindström and Jon Klassen in Conversation

One of my favorite parts of this job is talking to picture book creators about their art. But you know what’s even better than that? Talking to picture book creators about other picture book creators. Particularly when they’re in conversation with someone that they particularly admire.

If Eva Lindström isn’t a household name in America then that is no fault of hers. After all, she was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2022, has been nominated once for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and eleven times for the August award which she won in 2013. Add in the fact that she began her career as a comic artist and cartoonist, and has had a major influence on the new generation of comic book artists now emerging in Sweden, and you have yourself a particularly fascinating individual.

This year, Ms. Lindström is releasing the picture book The Bridge here in the States and it is like no other you’ll see this year.

Y’know, I don’t normally do this, but sometimes you have to grab a couple professional reviews to make a point. Here’s what they have had to say about the book:

“Translated from the original Swedish, with off-kilter and perspective-warped illustrations done in a pale wash of gouache and watercolor, this book is entirely original and unique. The text itself is straightforward and simple with an undercurrent of dry humor, but there are strategic and deliberate hints of violence painted ominously into the backgrounds…that give the story an unsettling feeling throughout. That, combined with the eerie, mic-drop ending, makes it feel somewhat like a Christopher Nolan film for kids in a 36-page picture-book format.”  —Booklist

“Lindström’s naïve gouache illustrations carry readers through a strange, mostly empty world seemingly fraught with danger…Enigmatic.”  —Kirkus Reviews

“Suspenseful…”  —Publishers Weekly 

Joining us today is Millie Von Platen, Editorial Assistant at Astra Books for Young Readers. She’ll be conducting this conversation between Eva and one of her most ardent fans, a fellow by the name of Jon Klassen. Sit in and enjoy the kind of discussion that only comes around once in a great while:

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Millie Von Platen: Hi, Eva and Jon! I’m so delighted to be talking to you both. I’m from Sweden, so when my colleague Leonard Marcus first brought Eva’s books to our edit meeting, I was thrilled— Eva’s works has this tongue-in-cheek and darkly humorous style that I always loved as a kid. When I moved the US for college and started working in the children’s publishing industry, I remember reading Jon’s stories and appreciating the similarly offbeat and wry twists. I also find that both your books have huge crossover appeal to adults— The Bridge and The Skull both don’t shy away from a subtle type of spookiness that I think can be appreciated by all ages. When you’re working on your books, do you find that you write and illustrate for adult readers as much as you do young readers?

Eva Lindström: I write and illustrate things that I myself find interesting. I do not want to write for a particular age group; I want to create stories that amuse me and are fun to work on. It is hard to believe that many people read and enjoy my books—it’s a lot easier to imagine that perhaps someone I know makes up my audience. Someone like me, maybe. I am quite child-like but also grown-up. 

Jon Klassen: I agree very much with Eva. I think the primary thing is to keep yourself, as the author, interested. That’s not entirely selfish, either. An audience can sense if the author is, or was, engaged when they made something, and most of the time the audience responds appropriately. If there is a consideration of a specific audience, like children, for me, it has to do with basic comprehension – I enjoy getting the main idea clear enough that a very young reader would understand it. But even then, that has more to do with an interest in general distillation than in an intended age group. It’s just a fun challenge to boil it down. 

MVP: Jon, when I first reached out to you about writing a blurb for The Bridge, you mentioned you had admired Eva’s illustrations for a long time. Given that most of Eva’s titles are in Swedish, I believe The Bridge is one of the first stories of hers you’d actually read. What was it that drew you to Eva’s work initially? And now that you’ve read her writing, do you find that view her work in a new way? 

JK: I think any one of Eva’s pictures would have stopped me in my tracks, no matter which one I saw first. It’s everything about them. She has such amazing texture and movement to her work, always just the right amount to excite you without taking attention away from the overall compositions, which are always so brave and organic. There are some approaches to illustration and image-making that believe in leading the eye and telling you where to look right away, and Eva doesn’t do that. She lets you look around, so when you find what you’re meant to find in there, it belongs to you. Her characters are never quite where you think they’re going to be, which, to me, points to a spirit of our smallness in the world, how we as inhabitants are only part of a place, part something larger and unsaid, instead of at the center of it. There is an honesty and a truth to that.

Her writing, to me, seems to have as much interest in negative space as her images do, and it is gentle and fearsome and loud and quiet and blunt and soft all at the same time. That’s not to say you can predict the writing just by looking at the pictures, but when you see them both together, they confirm each other in a wonderful way. Her story structure and pacing is another thing altogether, and is somehow the thing that hits me hardest in the end. She’s unlike anyone else I can think of in that area. 

Eva, I was excited that we have slightly similar approaches to writing, where we both seem to enjoy writing either in first person or using only the voices of the characters, without narration. Is that something that took a while for you to discover, or did that way of writing come quickly (it took me a little while to figure it out)?

EL: I think I have almost always used I and We in my stories. It puts me right in the story and lets me experience it in a good way, I like to think. The Bridge is probably the first time I’ve let the characters do all the talking. There are a lot of “probably”s and “maybe”s in everything I say; partly because I am still unsure about my whole process and my memory is kind of lousy. In any case, the narration becomes a bit more unreliable in a good way if it is written entirely in dialogue. And it’s easier to have fun ideas with the story. However, it has taken a while for me to get to purely dialogue-driven stories.

MVP: Eva, this is the first time your books have been published by a US publisher for an American audience. As you know, each country’s children’s book marketplace has specific needs and interests. What has your experience been writing for a Swedish audience, and what do you hope American kids reading THE BRIDGE for the first time will take away from your story?  

EL: My books have received all kinds of feedback here in Sweden. Some find them too strange, while others appreciate them for precisely that quality. I hope, of course, that American children will find joy in the slightly odd atmosphere when the Pig and the Wolf [in The Bridge] are chatting over a cup of coffee. And now I wonder how you feel that your books, Jon, have been received in Sweden and abroad and if the reception has been any different than in the US where your books were originally published? 

JK: I wish I had more direct experience with the reception my books have gotten abroad, especially in Sweden. I have a little, though, and by and large it seems that people outside the US are more comfortable with ambiguity, in the story or even in the purpose (if any) of the book. There’s an impulse in the US to have their children be directly instructed somehow by what they’re reading or looking at, and if you don’t do that, they’re often a little suspicious of what you’re up to. Almost everywhere else I’ve gotten to go with the books, they don’t need that, and they are able to enjoy what’s there, and what isn’t there, and talk about that. It’s very encouraging. 

MVP: Final questions! I am personally curious: if you weren’t children’s book author-illustrators what would you be? What were your favorite children’s books when you were young? And where do you draw inspiration from? 

EL: If I had a different career, I’d probably work in gardening, or perhaps something related to forests. And some of my favorite books when I was a child were Winnie the Pooh, Mio My Mio, The Little Prince, The Island Stallion, The Black Stallion, Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, and Rasmus på Luffen. My inspiration comes from everything that happens in the world, everything that happens to people I spend time with, everything I read, all the movies I watch, trees, mountains, animals, clouds. 

JK: Whenever I had a summer job when I was in school I would try very hard to get one that got me outside, and I’d get very sad if I couldn’t find one. I like to read about physics even though my math talents are pretty nonexistent, but maybe if I hadn’t been so interested in drawing I would’ve tried harder at math and been more useful there. I admire tradespeople a lot – carpenters or plaster workers or car mechanics, that kind of thing. 

I feel the same way as Eva about inspiration, it can come from just about anywhere, though I don’t think I have many actual ideas until I start to consider the form I’d be working in. Whatever the limitations or strengths of a particular medium is usually what gets me started and then I begin to realize I actually do have thoughts on whatever is happening out in the world. 

When I was little I loved Hardy Boys books, Tolkien, Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Archie comics, P.D. Eastman, and Alfred Hitchcock’s collections of scary stories. 

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I’d like to thank Kerry McManus and the team at Astra Books for Young Readers for organizing and putting together this conversation. Thanks to Millie for her insightful questions and to both Eva and Jon for taking the time to answer them so thoroughly.

The Bridge is available for purchase right now and as I mentioned before, it is like nothing else you may read here in America this year. Go find it!

Filed under: Interviews