Pushkin Children's Books

Jörg Mühle

Jörg Mühle studied art in Paris and has been a freelance illustrator since 2000. He has also worked as a professor, and has published a number of titles for children in German. Jörg also lives in Germany.

Ulrich Hub

Ulrich Hub is a German writer, actor, director and screenwriter. He has written several plays for children as well as for adults. Meet at the Ark at Eight! is his first novel, and has won prizes in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Italy. Ulrich lives in Berlin.

Tomiko Inui

Tomiko Inui (1924-2002) was born in Tokyo and joined a publishing house in 1950, where she worked as an editor, while also writing. A pioneer of children’s fantasy literature in Japan, she published many titles over her long career, won numerous prizes and was a runner-up for the Hand Christian Andersen Award. The Secret of the Blue Glass is the first of her books to be translated into English.

Lucie Arnoux

Lucie Arnoux is a keen storyteller, who likes to spend a lot of time on her illustrations, and in her illustrations. She left her native south of France for London, because the grass there is genuinely greener – and they have tea. Since graduating from Kingston University in Illustration & Animation, she has settled in a cottage where she paints and doodles and enjoys life.

E. L. Konigsburg

The writer and illustrator E. L. Konigsburg (1930-2013) is one of the most celebrated writers of books for children and young adults. She is the only author to have won the Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor in the same year – a feat she achieved in 1968, for From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, respectively. Not only that, but she won the Newbery Medal again almost thirty years later, for The View from Saturday.

Yiyun Li Wins Sunday Times Short Story Award

We are delighted to report that the great Yiyun Li has won the 2015 Sunday Times Short Story Award, for ‘A Sheltered Woman’. Li – who, among a universe full of other things, is the author of the ineffably beautiful The Story of Gilgamesh – fought off fellow nominees Elizabeth McCracken, Scott O’Connor, Paula Morris, Madeleine Thien and Rebecca F. John to win the prestigious award, which was judged by Andrew Holgate, Elif Shafak, Richard Eyre, Alex Clark and Aminatta Forna.

Elif Shafak said: ‘Amidst a diverse and dazzling shortlist, which made our job as jury members very, very difficult… Yiyun Li’s “A Sheltered Woman” has enchanted us with its exquisite crafting, brilliant observations and modest but powerful voice.’

Read the story now, here.

Delphine Perret

An author and illustrator, Delphine has already published a dozen children’s books of her own, as well as illustrating many others. Playing on words, sounds, senses and the unsaid, she teases the imagination of the reader with her pencil strokes, and draws them happily into a strange and very funny universe all her own. Take a look at her art in The Pointless Leopard.

Colas Gutman

Colas’ parents were writers, and for a long time he was convinced that it was the worst profession in the world… Until one day the joy of writing grabbed him. And it hasn’t let him go since. He is still a big kid, and writes his books in exactly the same way he used to do his homework when he was younger – lying on his bed, using a comic book as his desk, and this is how he wrote The Pointless Leopard.

Murielle Szac

Murielle Szac was born in Lyons. She has worked as a political journalist, been editor-in-chief at various children’s magazines and directed a number of documentaries for television. She has also written several books for children, including The Adventures of Theseus, as well as The Adventures of Hermes, and is currently the publisher of a children’s imprint at the French publishing house Actes Sud Junior.

Erich Kästner

Erich Kästner began his career as a journalist and, later, a freelance theatre critic. In 1929 he published his first book for children, Emil and the Detectives, which has since been translated into nearly 60 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. He then went on to publish Dot and Anton in 1931 and The Flying Classroom in 1933, both illustrated by Walter Trier, whose elegant, perceptive illustrations grace numerous Kästner books. After the Nazis took power in Germany, Kästner’s books – thinly veiled critiques of society’s fall to fascism – were denounced and burnt. He faced repeated arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, resulting in his blacklisting and exclusion from the writers’ guild. As such, his stories celebrate democracy, kindness, independent thinking and courage, and denounce unfairness, bullying, assumed authority and tyranny of any kind. After the end of World War II, Kästner moved to Munich and published The Parent Trap, later adapted into a hit film by Walt Disney. In 1957 he received the Georg Büchner Prize and, later, the Order of Merit and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contribution to children’s literature. One of the best loved and most read children’s authors around the world, Kästner died in Munich in 1974.

Burnt Books

Erich Kästner is the only writer known to have been present at the burning of his own books (‘Against decadence and the decline of morals!’ they yelled), on Berlin’s Opernplatz on 10 May 1933:

‘… And then Goebbels appeared. He stood in front of a balustrade besieged by microphones and gesticulated before the light of the fire like a little devil before Hell. He vociferated and spouted, called writers by their names and committed their books to the flames and oblivion. This was no Grand Inquisitor, but a little molesting pyrotechnician… Our intention to attend this apocalyptic public festival, as thorough chroniclers, to the end was thwarted by an unforeseen episode. ‘There’s Kästner!’ a young woman called out suddenly, as she passed by with her boyfriend. Her surprise at seeing me, so to speak, among the mourners at my own funeral, was so great that she even pointed at me. I must admit that I didn’t feel exactly comfortable. Shortly before, someone else had already called my name, loudly – that student of Gundolf’s, on his microphone-besieged balustrade…’ (from ‘Can Books Be Burnt? On the Anniversary of an Outrage’, 1947; published in On the Burning of Books, Atrium Verlag, 2013)

Click here for more information about Kästner and his books.

Walter Trier

Walter Trier – the illustrator of The Parent Trap, The Flying Classroom and Dot and Anton – was introduced to Erich Kästner in Berlin in 1927. He had begun his career drawing cartoons for the Berliner Illustrated and contributing to the satirical weekly Simplicissimus. During the 1920s he ridiculed Hitler and the Nazi Party in a series of cartoons, and continued to do so until 1933, despite great personal risk. In 1936 he fled to London, where he produced anti-Nazi leaflets and political propaganda drawings. Having had a rich career, including the production of around 150 covers for the humorous magazine Lilliput, he died in 1951 in Ontario, Canada.

Click here for more information.

Peter Sís

Peter Sís, author of The Pilot and the Little Prince, is the internationally renowned author and illustrator of many books for children. He is the recipient of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration and has also been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He has lived in New York since 1984.

Sonja Bougaeva

Sonja Bougaeva, the illustrator of The Story of Crime and Punishment, was born in 1975 in St Petersburg, the city in which this story takes place. After studying painting at the Academy of Arts she worked as an apprentice in a film studio, in order to learn how to make animated films. She now lives in Hamburg, and in 2006 she was shortlisted for the German Children’s Book Award.

A.B. Yehoshua

A. B. Yehoshua, the author of The Story of Crime and Punishment, was in born in Jerusalem in 1936 and spent his childhood in the besieged city. He fell in love with literature as a little boy, when his father read him de Amici’s Heart. Today he is an established writer, who draws his inspiration first and foremost from his children and grandchildren, to whom he often reads books out loud.

Emanuela Orciari

Emanuela Orciani was born in Pesaro. She has won awards with big names, like ‘Super Libro 2005’ and ‘Scarpetta d’Oro’. Yet she says that in King Lear she has found pretty much the complete story, and a story for everyone.

Melania G. Mazzucco

Melania G. Mazzucco, the author of The Story of King Lear, was born in Rome. In addition to writing, her greatest passions are swimming, flying and travelling. She spends her life telling stories. She wrote her first one, ‘The Tiger’, in verse, aged seven. It was about a sad tiger in a zoo. She is still working on her latest.

Annie M.G. Schmidt

Annie M.G. Schmidt (1911-95) was regarded as the Queen of Dutch Children’s Literature and her books have been an essential part of every Dutch childhood for the last fifty years. She trained as a librarian, but burst onto the literary scene when the newspaper she was working for discovered her gift for children’s verse. Having won numerous awards during her lifetime, including the 1989 Hans Christian Andersen Award, Schmidt is now included in the ‘Canon of Dutch History’ taught to all Dutch schoolchildren, alongside Spinoza, Anne Frank and Vincent van Gogh.

Maja Celija

Maja Celija, the illustrator of The Nose, was born in Slovenia in 1977. She attended primary school during Tito’s Yugoslavia, and secondary school during Tudman’s Croatia. She graduated from the European Institute of Design in Milan, and since then her illustrations have travelled all over the world. She now lives in Pesaro, but the forest is her second home: Maja adores the animals and the mushrooms.

Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri (b. Sicily, 1925) is a best-selling and prize-winning Italian theatre and television director and author, perhaps most famous for his Inspector Montalbano series of crime novels. Camilleri, the author of The Nose has won numerous awards in Italy, France and the UK, and his work has been translated into many languages, including French, German and Japanese.

Stefano Benni

Stefano Benni (b. Bologna, 1947) is an Italian poet, satirical writer and journalist. He has written for L‘Espresso, Panorama and La Repubblica, and has performed and staged various comedies and readings for the theatre, among them also this retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Miguel Tanco

Miguel Tanco, the illustrator of Cyrano de Bergerac, was born in Spain in 1972, and in ’99 flew to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts. In Italy, he has perfected the art of illustration, but most importantly produced Pablo, a tiny child whom he carries with him around Milan while he draws. He has published twenty-six books across the world, none for adults.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li, the author of The Story of Gilgamesh, was named by the New Yorker as one of the best US writers under 40. Translated into more than 20 languages, she has won numerous prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award. Although she is to all intents and purposes American, China (the country of her birth) is central to her, with all its contradictions.

Marco Lorenzetti

Marco Lorenzetti, the illustrator of The Story of Gilgamesh and The Story of the Betrothed, was born in the Italian region of Marche. He has loved drawing since he was a child, and at school his favourite subjects were Art, History and Mythology. In 2010 he attained a “Master Ars in Fabula” in Illustration from Macerata. He lives and works in Ancona.

Umberto Eco

Kim Fupz Aakeson

Kim Fupz Aakeson is known for his quirky, honest, serious, and wonderful picture books and biting young adult fiction. He has written more than 80 books for children and adults and won numerous awards. He is also known for being a prolific screenwriter.

Titles by Aakeson published by Pushkin Press:

Vitello Becomes a Businessman
Vitello Carries a Knife
Vitello Gets a Yucky Girlfriend
Vitello Scratches a Car
Vitello Wants a Dad

Bernardo Atxaga

Bernardo Atxaga, author of The Adventures of Shola, has written several books for adults, including Two Brothers, Obabakoak (Euskadi Prize, Spanish National Award for Narrative, finalist for the IMPAC European Literary Award), The Lone Man, The Lone Woman, The Accordionist’s Son (Grinzane Cavour Award, Mondello Prize, Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize) and Seven Houses in France (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; one of the best fiction books published in 2012 in USA, according to Publishers Weekly). His books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Alessandro Baricco

Alessandro Baricco, author of The Story of Don Juan, is an Italian writer who is read and translated all over the world. He has transformed books into television, and music into books. He knows the stories from the old days and the people of today. He has made a film about someone who very much resembles himself: a professor who has, his entire life, been intent on delivering a mad lecture.

Niels Bo Bojesen

Niels Bo Bojesen, the illustrator of the Vitello series, was born in 1958. He studied at the Danish School of Design in Copenhagen and at the School of VIsual Arts in New York. He specialises in editorial cartoons and children’s books.

Titles illustrated by Bojesen published by Pushkin Press:

Vitello Becomes a Businessman
Vitello Carries a Knife
Vitello Gets a Yucky Girlfriend
Vitello Scratches a Car
Vitello Wants a Dad

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe, the author of The Story of Gulliver, was born a long time ago in England, where he still lives. He has written twelve books, among them The House of Sleep and The Rain Before It Falls, but knows that he will never write as beautiful a book as Gulliver’s Travels.

Tonke Dragt

Tonke Dragt writes and illustrates books of adventure, fantasy and fairy tales. She was born in 1930 in Indonesia. When she was twelve, she was imprisoned in a Japanese camp during the war, where she wrote her very first book using begged and borrowed paper. After the war, she and her family moved to the Netherlands, where she became an art teacher. She published her first book in 1961, and a year later this was followed by her most famous story, The Letter for the King, which won the Children’s Book of the Year Award and has been translated into sixteen languages. She was awarded the State Prize for Youth Literature in 1976 and was knighted in 2001.

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers, the author of The Story of Captain Nemo, has written many books for adults and a few for young people, including The Wild Things. He is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of writing, tutoring and publishing centres for youth. A sister centre, The Ministry of Stories, opened in East London in 2010.

Pierre Gripari

Pierre Gripari was born in 1925 in Paris, to a French mother and a Greek father. He studied at the prestigious Louis-le-Grand lycée, and tried his hand at various jobs, including serving in the army and acting as a trade-union delegate for an oil company.

He resigned in 1957 in order to become a writer, but it was not until the 1970s that he became famous, with the publication of his Contes de la rue Broca, translated in The Good Little Devil. In these tales, the giants, witches and mermaids of traditional fairy tales leap from the page, animated by a very modern spirit. Blessed with a healthy disrespect for authority, the author took great pleasure in upsetting the natural order of the fantastic.

Pierre Gripari died in Paris in 1990.

Áslaug Jónsdóttir

Áslaug Jónsdóttir is an illustrator, author of children’s books, artist, and graphic designer. She has written and illustrated several books for children, amongst them The Story of the Blue Planet, The Egg (Eggi, 2003), I Want Fish! (Ég vil fisk! 2007), and the award-winning Good Evening (Gott kvöld, 2005), which received The Bookseller’s Prize as the best children’s book of 2005, The Icelandic Illustration Award, The Reykjavik Educational Council Children’s Book Prize, and was nominated for The Nordic Children’s Book Award.

Andri Snaer Magnason

Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated young writers. In 2002 LoveStar was named Novel of the Year by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize. The Story of the Blue Planet, now published or performed in 22 countries, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Prize and was also the recipient of the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award and the West Nordic Children’s Book Prize. Andri is the winner of the 2010 Kairos Award.

Alessandro Maria Nacar

Alessandro Maria Nacar, the illustrator of The Story of Don Juan, occupies himself with all that which—in fashion, in advertising, in places—catches his eye. This is his first illustrated book.

Fabian Negrin

Fabian Negrin, the illustrator of The Story of Captain Nemo, was born in Argentina in 1963 and from when he was fifteen years old he drew every day, sometimes all day. He came to Italy more than twenty years ago and has now illustrated and written about a hundred books for children in Europe, Asia and America. He has a son and lives in Milan.

Sara Oddi

Sara Oddi, the illustrator of The Story of Gulliver, was born in Ascoli Pieno in 1984. Ever since she was little, she entertained herself by inventing and illustrating stories. She lives in a small village near her birthplace and, although a few years have passed since then, this remains her great passion, together with good Marchesian food.

Laura Paoletti

Laura Paoletti, the illustrator of The Story of Antigone, is a very young artist from Macerata, with a degree in painting. She paints, illustrates, photographs, collects birds’ feathers. She has always had a mania for drawing, and even as a child she did this on walls, on trousers, on hands and the face. Selected at Bologna in 2010 for the exhibition The Grammar of Figures, today, with Antigone, she has illustrated her first book.

Anne Plichota & Cendrine Wolf

After studying Chinese language and culture, Anne Plichota lived and worked in Korea and China. Her past jobs included working as a Chinese teacher, a nurse’s aide, a public letter writer, and most recently a librarian. She enjoys American and Gothic literature and hearing people’s stories. She lives in Strasbourg with her teenage daughter.

Cendrine Wolf studied sports, and went on to work as a social worker in deprived neighbourhoods. She taught herself illustration, and loves fantasy literature and speed ‘in all its forms’.

Oksa Pollock: The Last Hope is out now.

Puig Rosado

Puig Rosado, the illustrator of The Good Little Devil, was born in Spain on April Fools’ Day, 1931 — a date of birth that is surely not entirely free of responsibility for the course the rest of his life then took. His humorous posters, drawings and cartoons have been published in numerous countries, his work is on display in museums across Europe, and he has been honoured with many prizes. Puig Rosado is absolutely convinced that people with no sense of humour go, without exception, to hell!

Mårten Sandén

Mårten Sandén, author of A House Without Mirrors, was born in Stockholm in 1962 and spent most of his childhood in the university town of Lund, in southern Sweden. He has been writing, in one way or another, more or less full-time since his early twenties. Starting out as a professional songwriter for music publishers in Europe and the US, Sandén began writing children’s books in the mid-1990s. The Petrini Detectives, a series of mysteries for Middle Readers, was launched in 1999. Since then, he has written around thirty more children’s books, ranging from picture books to novels for young adults. His work has been translated into Danish, German, Russian and English. Mårten Sandén is a member of The Swedish Academy of Children’s Book Writers and The Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy. He lives in Stockholm with his wife and daughter.

Moa Schulman

Moa Schulman, the illustrator of A House Without Mirrors, has one foot in the world of images and another in text; she studied Literature and Linguistics at Stockholm University, and illustration and graphic design at Konstfack. She designs for print, illustrates for children, and publishes books in her own Dockhaven imprint. House

Ali Smith

Ali Smith, the author of The Story of Antigone, was born in Inverness, where she was quite good at ice-skating and spent a lot of time on the back of a black Shetland pony called Hodrum. When she was about seven years old she began to write stories and poems. The first poem that she remembers writing was about a girl called Isabel debating with an adder, which was threatening to bite her, about which of them would live the longest. (Isabel won.)

Mikel Valverde

Born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the prize-winning writer and illustrator Mikel Valverde studied at the Fine Arts Faculty of the Basque Public University, where he started creating comics, and illustrations for his own stories. One day he met Bernardo Atxaga in the neighbourhood where they both lived, and so began both their friendship and their working relationship. They have published several books together since then, in addition to the Shola stories.