This article sheds light on translated children’s literature in Sweden during the period 2015-2020. A relatively large portion of children’s literature in Sweden (36% according to 2020 data published by The Swedish Institute for Children's Books), from toddler books to young adult literature, comes from translations. It has been shown in polysystem research in particular (see Even-Zohar 1979; 1990), that countries such as Sweden, so-called ‘semi-peripheral’ (Heilbron 2000) or with a so-called ‘dominated language’ (Casanova 2002, 9), are known to import a lot of literature because, for example, their internal production is rather limited, which a priori is not the case in Sweden.

We first present a panorama of what kinds of books are translated to Swedish and from which languages. We focus then on the particular position of French speaking (broadly defined) children’s literature in Sweden, the global phenomena of the series and the emerging wimmelbooks in which French illustrators. We observe that even if Sweden has a larger national production, there is still an important number of translated picturebooks, in which French illustrators may fill a vacuum.