Editorial

This special issue on Nordic children's literature, to celebrate the IBBY congress in Copenhagen in September 2008, is edited by a guest editor, Nina Christensen.

—Valerie Coghlan and Siobhán Parkinson Editors, Bookbird

One of the basic tenets of IBBY is that children can benefit from reading about the experiences of others – across national borders, across ethnicity and across languages. This issue of Bookbird combines a national, a regional and an international approach to children's literature. It celebrates the IBBY congress to be held in Copenhagen in September 2008, and one of the aims has been to introduce readers to different aspects of Danish children's literature – its history and conditions of production, authorships that represent significant contemporary trends, and current research interests, such as the history of Danish children's literature, the development and refinement of tools for textual analysis and the concept of genre.

It is evident that Danish children's literature is influenced by the Western canon of children's literature. There is also a strong interaction among the children's literatures of Scandinavia, and therefore this issue of Bookbird also includes articles on children's literature in Norwegian and Swedish, as well as illustrations from these countries. Many books are translated from one Scandinavian language to another, and it would seem possible to list a number of authors from these countries who function as intertextual references across borders as a sort of 'Nordic' canon of children's literature. One example is Selma Lagerlöf, who in her famous children's book, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–07) (published in English as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), demonstrates the regional and national identity of a citizen of the world.

The articles gathered here demonstrate the strong similarities between, for instance, Norwegian and Danish young adult fiction, and picturebooks from Norway and Sweden, while at the same time, contributors also root regional tendencies in a broader international context of literature, illustration and characteristics of Western society in general.

Finally, the reader is introduced to the ALMA prize and the institutes for children's literature in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, in order to demonstrate how attention is drawn, in this part of the world, to the importance of literature for children and how knowledge on the subject is gathered and disseminated.