A Very Scandinavian Christmas: The Greatest Nordic Holiday Stories of All Time - Hardcover

Hans Christian Andersen (1805--75) was a Danish poet, novelist, and writer of fairy tales.T. Pym is the pseudonym of 19th-century illustrator Clara Creed.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is best-known for his misogyny and as the author of Miss Julie (1889). His first success came as a novelist and autobiographer. His plays (and he wrote over sixty) were deeply controversial in their time and still are to some extent. They range form bold naturalism (e.g. The father, 1887) to an entralling expressionism (e.g. The Ghost Sonata, 1907). Caryl Churchill (1938-) is probably the most respected woman dramatist in the English-speaking world. She is the author of some twenty plays including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Serious Money, The Skriker, Blue Heart, Far Away and A Number, seen and admired all over the world.

Selma Lagerlöf was born on Nov. 20, 1858, in the province of Varmland, Sweden. She was born at home on the family estate called, Mårbacka. As a child, Selma spent countless hours writing poetry. A childhood illness left her unable to walk for a period of about two years so she spent hours reading books and being educated by governesses. At the age of twenty-two, she took college preparatory classes. She stayed on the family estate until she was twenty-three years old, at which time she enrolled in a teachers' college located at Stockholm. Four years later, she became a teacher for an all-girls secondary school based in Landskrona. After five years of teaching, she had finally finished her first novel and had submitted part of it to a literary contest posted in a Swedish publication. They awarded her first place. The following year in 1891, "Gösta Berling's Saga" was published. Once the book was translated into Danish, it received notoriety that propelled her success in her home country and abroad.