Tykon, Katarina

Katarina Tykon was born on July 29, 1932 in a tent camp in Albuy and was the fourth child in the Swedish Agda Karlsson and gypsy Johan Tykon. Katarina's father, Johan Taykon, came to Sweden from Russia in 1900. He met Katarina's mother in Gothenburg , where she worked as a waitress in a restaurant, and he worked as a violinist. He already had a wife, an elderly Russian woman, who in the past was a ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater. She was not opposed to taking a young wife ^[1] . Katharina Tykon had an older brother and two sisters - sister Rosa , who also became a silver craftswoman and a well-known public figure, brother Paul and sister Paulina. In addition, singer Caldaras, Hans is her cousin. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was nine months old. After that, the father tried to get his children to school, but this was possible only after a few months, since the school did not want to take Roma children. At the age of five, Katarina Tykon was placed in the adoptive family of a childless couple from Skelleftea , and two years later in an orphanage in Umeå under the name Ketty Karlsson, from where her father soon took her. A few years after the death of Agda, her father married for the third time, a Swedish woman named Siv, who was a brutal stepmother who beat her stepdaughters and demanded that her husband send his first wife to another camp ^[1] .

At the age of thirteen, when the family camped in Tantolunden , Katarina Tykon first went to school, where she was harassed and harassed. After studying at school for only a year, at the age of fourteen, Katarina Tykon married a man 6 years older than her and went to live with him in his camp in a suburb of Stockholm, but the marriage was unhappy, and a few months later she returned back to Tantolunden.

When Katharina Tykon was sixteen years old, she played a key role in the short film Arne Suksdorfa "Problems" (Uppbrott).

In the late 1940s, she left the family camp and went to live in the City Girls Missionary House before she got her own apartment. After she also starred in several films. In 1963, Katarina Tykon published her first autobiographical book, The Gypsy, in which she described the bias of society towards Gypsies. This was her first step in the fight for equal rights when she, a gypsy, wrote about the life of gypsies in Sweden.

For nearly twenty years, Katarina Tykon has fought for the right of Roma to education, housing and work in Sweden on equal terms with representatives of other nationalities. Her first children's book from the Katitsi series was published in the fall of 1969 and gained instant success, after which Tykon continued to write books about the adventures of the gypsy Katitsi, based on her memories.

1982 Tykon had a cardiac arrest, and she fell into a coma until her death in 1995 ^[2] . In autumn 2012, Lowen Mokhtadi published an autobiography of Katarina Tykon entitled "The Day I Will Be Free."

• Zigenerska (Gypsy), 1963
• Zigenare är vi (We are gypsies), 1967
• Dikter (Poems), 1968

Katitzi

• Katitzi (Katitsi), 1969
• Katitzi och Swing (Katitzi and Swing), 1970
• Katitzi i ormgropen (Katitzi in a pit with snakes), 1971
• Katitzi rymmer (Katitzi holds on), 1971
• Katitzi, Rosa och Paul (Katitzi, Rosa and Paul), 1972
• Katitzi i Stockholm (Katitzi in Stockholm), 1973
• Katitzi och Lump-Nicke (Katitzi and Lump-Nick), 1974
• Katitzi i skolan (Katitzi at school), 1975
• Katitzi Z-1234 (Katitzi Z-1234)
• Katitzi barnbruden (Katitzi - little bride), 1977
• Katitzi på flykt (Katitzi on the run), 1978
• Katitzi i Gamla sta'n (Katitzi in the old town), 1979
• Uppbrott (Malfunctions), 1980

• Official site of Katarina Tykon