26/04/2013 - Swedish director Maud Nycander is preparing a bio-pic on the Swedish author, whose character Pippi Longstocking sold 150 million books worldwide

While Swedish producer Mirijam Johansson, of Sweden's Wanted Pictures, is packaging Efraim Longstocking and the Cannibal Princess - the family story of Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren's character, which sold 150 million books worldwide - Swedish director Maud Nycander is preparing a biopic on the Swedish author (photo): "She's part of our common frame of reference."

Nycander was most recently nominated for a Guldbagge - Sweden's national film prize - for her 2012 documentary Palme, on Sweden's late, assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme, co-directed by Kristina Lindström - and she received the award for her first film, The Nun (2007).

"Lindgren was very concerned about her private sphere. I hope to describe her as a complex human being,  and to find some of the keys to how she became this person. There is a sadness about her, and an obersving look which I will try to approach. But above all - how she was and how her stories same up," Nycander told Sweden's DN. IMDb credits her with feeding 74 film and television titles.

"The Swedish Academy? What use would they have of an old woman who is half blind, half deaf and totally crazy?" she responded, when asked whether she would like become a member. "I don't mean anything by my writing. I just write for the child in myself."

In the 1930s, then a typist and stenographer outside Vimmerby in Småland, southern Sweden, Lindgren told her stories to her daughter. She started writing them early 1940s: her first Pippi book was rejected by Sweden's Bonnier Publishing - Time Magazine included it among the world's 100 most influential novels ever written. The biopic, probably with a TV version, will be ready for Christmas 2014, staged by Swedish producer Francy Suntinger, for FilmLance.