Ulf Stark Fruitloops and Dipsticks; Sheiks, Jaguars, and Dictators

Ulf Stark (1944–2017) was one of Sweden's greatest writers for children and young adults, on par with Lennart Hellsing, Maria Gripe, and Astrid Lindgren. Stark's authorship span over half a century—more than a hundred books and a fair amount of screenplays, fairy tales, and essays. He was a brilliant storyteller, with a unique ability to approach difficult topics with a sense of humor. "There was a certain magic to everything he wrote," concluded literary critic Lotta Olsson after he passed away in 2017.

Stark's stories addressed the big questions in life, always with sincerity and humanity. He won all the prestigious Swedish children's and young adult literature awards, as well as some Nordic and international ones. He was also nominated several times for the largest international award of them all: the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Where It All Began

Ulf Stark made his debut as a writer for adults in 1964, aged only nineteen, with a collection of poems called Ett hål till livet (A hole to life). He published two more works for adults—a collection of poetry and a novel—and wrote for the culture section of one of the major Swedish tabloids for a few years before he started on his career as a children's writer, which would become his legacy. It began in 1975 with Petter och den röda fågeln (Petter and the red bird).

The breakthrough came in 1984 when his young adult novel Fruitloops and Dipsticks (Dårfinkar och dönickar) won first prize in a competition arranged by one of Sweden's most prominent publishing houses. Long before gender identity issues became commonplace in Swedish children's and young adult literature, Stark wrote the story of Simone, who arrives at her new school and finds she is mistaken for a boy. She decides to play along and becomes Simon.

This is one of three young adult novels that Stark wrote on the topic of metamorphosis. Several scholars, such as Boel Westin and Ulla Lundqvist, have compared Simone to androgynous forerunners like the Swedish C. J. L. Almqvist's Tintomara in The Queen's Diadem (Drottningens juvelsmycke, 1834) and Virginia Woolf's Orlando in Orlando (1928). The novel's importance to the Stark universe, however, goes beyond the gender transgression. In April of 2018, the Swedish Institute for Children's Books arranged a day in Stark's honor, and in a speech his editor for thirty years Birgitta Westin called Fruitloops and Dipsticks "the primal story of his universe." All the basic elements of his authorship—humor, love, death, human knowledge, etc.—were there already in 1984, Westin concluded.

Autobiography Made Fiction

Fruitloops and Dipsticks is one of Stark's most famous books. Equally renowned are the works based partly on experiences and environments from Stark's own childhood. He wrote several stories about the boy Ulf, lending the protagonist his own name, family circumstances, and childhood surroundings. Some of the most well-known are the trilogy about the friendship between Ulf and the boy Percy: My Friend Percy's Magical Gym Shoes (Min vän Percys magiska gymnastikskor, 1991), My Friend Percy and the Sheik (Min vän Shejken i Stureby, 1995), and My Friend Percy and Buffalo Bill (Min vän Percy, Buffalo Bill och jag, 2004).

These stories take place in the 1950s in Stureby, the Stockholm suburb where Ulf Stark grew up, and on the island Möja in the Stockholm archipelago. They depict a homosocial and decidedly male boy culture of its days, but as Magnus Öhrn has noted, the male Stureby world and its boy jargon are not just mythologizing the gender construction and the power hierarchies of the 1950s; Stark is also aware of them and questions this order, not least through the portraits of Ulf's mother.

Death and Mourning as Important Motifs

Much like Astrid Lindgren, Stark embraced difficult topics like death and grief. He took them very seriously and often let his main characters mourn loved ones, whether human or animal. In...