All the cool kids in Stockholm will be reading ‘Drömlandet’, artist Clara Hallencreutz’s new children’s book

On Sunday afternoon, Stockholm’s hippest kids, clad in tiny adidas sneakers and bomber jackets, gathered in the main hall at Soho House to mingle (OK, run about and climb on plush furniture) and snack on hotdogs. The occasion? The launch of artist Clara Hallencreutz’s new children’s book. Dubbed Drömlandet, the book, which the artist both wrote and illustrated, presents a fictional dreamland in which the week has eight days (sounds great, honestly) and magical things tend to happen. Hallencretuz’s husband, actor Fares Fares, read the book’s first section – the first day – for the occasion (the couple’s two sons, Ziggy and Tino, were among the well-dressed children in attendance).

For Hallencreutz, coming up with the story itself was an act of desperation. “It was a desperate move to get my kids to go to bed,” she says. “Drömlandet is a place where bedtime is not the end of playtime but the beginning of a night’s adventure.” Rather than a book to be passively enjoyed by a disengaged child, Hallencreutz hopes that Drömlandet sparks creativity for both parent and kid. It’s less a story than an idea – a thought exercise written in rhyme that presents, as she puts it, “more questions than answers”. “It’s a luxury to spend time in a children's fantasy world,” she says. “Kids are jam-packed with imagination, but we don’t cherish it as we should, we take it for granted, and schools pretty much unteaches creativeness. It will dimmish if we don’t use it and it will grow if we do.”

In the two years that it took Hallencreutz to complete the book, her own children acted as critics and contributors, bringing their own ideas to the table. Four-year-old Ziggy, for instance, came up with the character of the skeleton fish. “He asks me a lot about death at the moment, it’s a tricky subject to digest,” she says. “I told him once that even though my grandmother is dead, she’s definitely alive in my dreams. So when Ziggy saw a spread from the ocean city with all its sea creatures he asked me where all the dead fishes were. So I painted a fish skeleton swimming among the other fishes. Now when I see it I always think of my grandmother.”

As for who is the best bedtime reader at home – Hallencreutz or Fares – that’s currently up for debate. “I would say Fares! I would love Fares to read for me as well just before my bedtime, he has a very comforting and soothing effect on me,” says Hallencreutz. “But I think my kids' favourite reader is my mum.”