Thor was born in Gothenburg in 1950. She has worked as a librarian, a novelist, screen writer and as a journalist. She has won the August Prize for the children's story Truth or Dare in 1997 and the German state award for children's fiction (Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis) also for A Faraway Island in 1999.[1]
She wrote a novel about Jewish children who escaped the Holocaust to live on an island in Sweden. This is called A Faraway Land in English and Thor has written sequels. She has written twenty novels and they have been translated into 18 languages.[1]