Maria Nikolajeva is a Professor of comparative literature at Stockholm University. She is the author and editor of several books, among them Children's Literature Comes of Age: Toward the New Aesthetic (1996), How Picture Books Work, co-authored with Carole Scott (2001), From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature (2002), The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature (2002), and Aesthetic Approaches to Children's Literature (2005). She received the International Grimm Award in 2005.