Pippi Longstocking

"What I loved most about the main character was that she was a girl — strong, fearless, fun."

"I loved this and the other Pippi books as a child. They were a favourite from my trips to the local library every Saturday morning. Pippi is simply joyful. She is curious and courageous, creative and kind. She doesn’t worry about the small things like matching stockings or tidy hair. She doesn’t blindly follow convention but is very much her own person. She makes mistakes but finds her way through them. Looking back she was perhaps an early female role model for me! She taught me early on that I don’t need to follow conventional paths. That’s the power of fiction . One of the ways we learn new ideas and build confidence in what we can do is through vicarious experience, and fiction is a great source of this. Reading can teach you how to think around a situation, see different approaches and it can give us courage to try them ourselves. Great lessons. In fact there’s a whole new academic field emerging from positive psychology, called ‘positive humanities’ which looks at the role of humanities in developing wellbeing."

"I love rereading and sharing the books I read and loved as a child, such as the Pippi Longstocking series by Astrid Lindgren and everything by Roald Dahl."