Roald Dahl dedicated The BFG to his daughter Olivia.
The BFG was published in 1982 and tells the story of Sophie, an orphan who meets the Big Friendly Giant. Unlike the other giants, the BFG collects and distributes pleasant dreams rather than eating people.
Olivia was Dahl’s eldest daughter with his first wife, Patricia Neal. She died in 1962 at the age of seven after contracting measles encephalitis. Dahl later supported vaccination and wrote about the tragedy in his 1986 essay “Measles: A Dangerous Illness.”
The dedication can be easy to confuse with Dahl’s other family tributes, because several of his books were connected to people close to him. The BFG itself was inspired partly by Dahl’s storytelling for his children, but its dedication specifically names Olivia.