Pippi Longstocking Was Rejected First
Quick answer: Pippi Longstocking was turned down by Sweden's most prestigious publisher before Astrid Lindgren won a contest with it in 1945. The story of a famous no.
In September 1944 a thirty-six-year-old Stockholm secretary named Astrid Lindgren received a rejection letter from Bonnier, the most prestigious publishing house in Sweden. The manuscript they were declining was about a superhumanly strong red-haired girl who lived alone with a horse and a monkey, kept a suitcase of gold coins, and answered to no adult. Bonnier hesitated, held the manuscript for months, and finally said no. The book was 'Pippi Longstocking'. The refusal has since become one of publishing's most quoted regrets, but on the day the letter arrived it was simply a no, addressed to an unknown woman with no literary track record.
What makes Lindgren's story worth a working writer's attention is not the schadenfreude of a publisher's mistake. It is what she did in the twelve months after the rejection, and the odd, instructive fact that the book which built one of the great careers in children's literature reached print through a contest.
A name invented at a bedside
Pippi began as spoken words, not a manuscript. In 1941 Lindgren's seven-year-old daughter Karin was in bed with pneumonia and asked her mother for a story about, in her own invented phrase, Pippi Långstrump, Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren, taking the strange name as a brief, improvised a girl as strange as the name: strongest in the world, entirely free, gleefully immune to adult authority. The stories became a running fixture at bedtime, told for years to Karin and her friends, tested nightly on the most honest audience there is.
There was still no book. Lindgren was a working secretary and mother, and by her own later accounts she had told herself, as a schoolgirl teased for writing well, that she would never become an author. The manuscript only came into being because of an accident: in March 1944 she slipped on an icy Stockholm street and sprained her ankle. Stuck at home, she wrote the Pippi stories down in shorthand, typed them up, and gave the manuscript to Karin for her tenth birthday in May 1944. She sent a copy to Bonnier almost as an afterthought, with a cover note whose self-deprecating humour is often retold: she urged the publisher not to alert the child welfare authorities about her heroine.
The letter from Bonnier
Bonnier's editors were not fools, and the record suggests the decision was genuinely difficult; the house sat on the manuscript for months before declining. Pippi was unlike anything on their list. She mocked teachers, upended coffee parties, and suffered no consequences. In the cautious pedagogical climate of the 1940s, a book that sided so completely with the child against the adult world looked like a risk. So the risk was declined.
Here is the detail that separates Lindgren from most rejected writers: she did not stop, and she did not simply resubmit the same pages elsewhere and wait. While Pippi was still under consideration she had already entered a different manuscript, a realistic story for girls, in a competition run by Rabén and Sjögren, a small and struggling new publisher. In late 1944 that book, 'The Confidences of Britt-Mari', took second prize and became her first published title. The unknown secretary now had a foot in a door, a small one, at the least glamorous house in Stockholm.
The contest that changed children's literature
In 1945 Rabén and Sjögren announced another competition, this time for children's books. Lindgren went back to Pippi, and this is the part rejection stories usually skip: she revised. The version she entered was reworked from the manuscript Bonnier had seen, tightened and in places softened. She was not merely persistent; she was persistent with a pencil.
The revised 'Pippi Longstocking' won first prize and was published in November 1945. Swedish children received it the way children have received it everywhere since: as a liberation. Sales were enormous almost immediately, sequels followed, and the small publisher that had taken the chance was carried to stability substantially on Pippi's shoulders. Lindgren herself joined Rabén and Sjögren in 1946 as an editor and ran its children's list for over two decades, writing her own books in the early mornings before work. Her stories have since been translated into roughly a hundred languages, and Pippi remains in print everywhere. Bonnier's refusal, meanwhile, entered industry folklore, reportedly regretted within the house for generations.
Why the turn actually happened
It would be tidy to say persistence won. It did, but look at the machinery of it. First, the material had been tested for years on live listeners; Lindgren knew the stories worked because children kept demanding them. Second, she diversified: while one manuscript sat with a publisher, another entered a contest. Third, when a door opened a crack with the Britt-Mari prize, she brought her best and strangest work to that same door. Fourth, she revised rather than resubmitted. And fifth, honestly, there was luck: a new publisher happened to be running competitions precisely because it needed manuscripts, at precisely the moment she had one.
Notice too what the contest structure gave her that open submission had not: a deadline, a level field where an unknown secretary could beat established names, and a guaranteed reading. For writers without connections, those three things are still what competitions are for. Writory's monthly contest works on the same principle, every entry read and scored between the 1st and the 25th, results on the 30th, so a manuscript is never met with silence.
What a working writer can take from it
The first lesson is about audience. Pippi was not invented for a market; she was invented for one sick seven-year-old and refined on years of bedtime audiences. If you have any way to put your work in front of real listeners or readers before you submit it, use it. The nightly test told Lindgren what no editor's letter could: that the character was alive.
The second lesson is about how to hold a rejection. Bonnier's no contained real information, the book was risky, and Lindgren's revision suggests she took the information without taking the verdict. That is the whole craft of surviving rejection in one sentence: extract the signal, discard the sentence of death. She was thirty-eight when Pippi was published, a late start by the standards of literary mythology and an entirely normal one by the standards of actual literary history.
Reading Pippi as a writer
Read 'Pippi Longstocking' with a craftsman's eye and the anarchy turns out to be carefully engineered. Every episode runs on the same reliable spring: an adult institution, school, the circus, a coffee party, meets a child with total power and no malice, and the institution comes apart in a way that is funny rather than cruel. Study how Lindgren keeps Pippi kind, generous, and faintly lonely underneath the strength; that undertone of the orphan waiting for her father is what stops the book being a mere joke machine. Comic invention plus a quiet ache: it is a formula worth stealing for a poem as much as for a story.
What poets can take from this
- Test stories on a live audience before an editor ever sees them.
- Keep more than one manuscript in circulation so a single no cannot stop you.
- Treat a rejection as information about the draft, not a verdict on the writer.
- Revise before you resubmit; Lindgren's winning Pippi was not the rejected Pippi.
- Use contests for what they give the unconnected: a deadline, a level field, a guaranteed reading.
- Give your wildest character one quiet sorrow to keep readers attached.
Try it yourself
Invent a character from nothing but a nonsense name, the way Karin Lindgren invented 'Pippi Longstocking'. Say the name aloud, then write the character the name demands: their strength, their home, and the one rule of the adult world they cheerfully break.
Questions
Who rejected Pippi Longstocking?
The Swedish publisher Bonnier declined the original manuscript in 1944 after holding it for several months. The decision is widely described as one of publishing's most regretted rejections, since the revised book went on to become a worldwide classic.
How did Pippi Longstocking finally get published?
Astrid Lindgren revised the manuscript and entered it in a 1945 children's book competition run by the new publisher Rabén and Sjögren. It won first prize and was published in November 1945, becoming an immediate success in Sweden.
How old was Astrid Lindgren when Pippi was published?
She was 38 when Pippi Longstocking appeared in 1945. Her first published book, a contest runner-up called 'The Confidences of Britt-Mari', had come out only the year before. She then worked for decades as both an author and a children's book editor.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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