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In 1954, the Finnish artist Tove Jansson was commissioned by the Evening News in London to draw comic strips about the Moomintrolls. The strip was syndicated by hundreds of newspapers, introducing the Moomins to an international audience and marking a dramatic turning point in her career.

There is a world beyond our own, where imagination and reality meet, and where, for 80 years, Tove Jansson’s Moomins illustrations have offered readers a way to recognise themselves.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of The Moomins, the Finnish/Swedish trolls that have delighted generations of children, becoming a cultural phenomenon in their own right. While posterity will likely remember her as the inventor of Moomins, Tove Jansson was in fact a strikingly multi-talented creative force.

In 1989, the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin published The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, she notes that many stories depend heavily on a hero with a sword or weapon as a central object, while bags seem boring and insignificant.