Marguérite Elisabeth Verschuur was born in Amsterdam in 1935 and grew up in Overveen and Bloemendaal. As a twelve-year old in 1948, shortly after the war, Rita Verschuur spent two weeks in Sweden with Finnish-Swedish friends of her father, both to learn the language and to find her independence. That visit marked the beginning of a lifelong connection with Sweden and a translation oeuvre that – if you include her translations of her own work – encompasses thirty-one writers from five different countries: the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (Finland Swedish). These were mainly translations of foreign authors into Dutch, but they also included some works by Dutch writers that Verschuur translated into Swedish. Translations of the children’s book author Astrid Lindgren make up a significant proportion of Verschuur’s translation corpus from Swedish. For many years, Verschuur was Lindgren’s permanent translator for Dutch.