The news that Finland’s Tove Jansson is to be honoured with a commemorative €2 coin to mark the centenary of her birth should bring a trickle of joy through the leathery heart of the crabbiest old Eurosceptic. She was one of the finest, and toughest, European writers of the past 60 years, whether she wrote for children or for adults. The Moomin books are classics that speak to the child in children and the adult in grownups and let them share together her joyful and stoic appreciation of life. The books she wrote for adults have a clear-eyed appreciation of transience. She is a poet of solitude and of love, of family and idiosyncrasy, of courage and absurdity. No writer could be further from tweeness or sentimentality. Although she wrote in Swedish with daunting economy and power, the exuberance of her imagination survived translation into many languages and from the smallest My to the largest Groke her characters have enriched us all.