| Guest of the ilb 2005
Peter Sís, illustrator, author and filmmaker, was
born in the Czech city of Brno in 1949 and is counted among the truly
great representatives of international picture book art. He
studied at Prague’s Academy of Applied Arts and at the Royal College in
London. In 1982 a film commission took him to the USA, where he
has lived ever since. His works include twenty-eight animated
films and over sixty books, posters – among them, one for Milos
Forman’s film 'Amadeus' (1984) – as well as theatre sets, frescoes,
collages, building adornment, objects and commissions for newspapers
and magazines.
Peter Sís is a wanderer between worlds. He understands how to
address inner longing and how to lead his readers into a space between
reality and fantasy. His picture books are an homage to both
autobiographical and historical people and places: 'The Three Golden
Keys' (1994), edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, recalls his native
city, Prague; 'Tibet. Through the Red Box' (1998), deals with his
father’s encounter with unexplored Tibet in the fifties; his picture
book series about the small hero 'Madlenka' (2000) portrays his
daughter’s modern, metropolis childhood in the Global Village of New
York and has been broadcast as an animated cartoon on 'Sesame Street'.
With an overflowing love of detail and fantastic expressiveness, Sís
fashions a world of images full of headstrong mysteries and
magic. His illustrations captivate through graphic elegance and
artistic perfection. Using a pointillist drawing technique, he
creates filigree structures which, through their colourful display, are
of great suggestive power.
Peter Sís, who with 'Follow the Dream' (1991) and 'Starry Messenger'
(1996) opened the doors to the wondrous and artful cabinets of history
of the sciences, illustrates the life of the naturalist Charles Darwin
and tells of giant sea turtles, sea crabs, toucans and flying fish in
'The Tree of Life: A book depicting the life of Charles Darwin'.
Maps, plates, sketches of animals and skeletons, vignettes and
foldout double pages combine to create a "grandiose engraved picture
book labyrinth", as the 'Luchs-Jury' remarked. His discovery
books such as those about Columbus the world sailor and the astronomer
Galileo encourage children to pursue their own paths. "I want to
tell children that Galileo and Darwin were also children once, and that
some child today might be tomorrow’s Darwin." 'The Tree of
Life' was awarded the Bologna Ragazzi Award as the best non-fiction
book (2004) and is nominated for the German Young Adults Literature
Prize of 2005.
Peter Sís’s pictorial work has been exhibited worldwide. His
children’s books have been published in over thirty countries and have
received international prizes, among them the Boston Globe/Horn Book
Award and the Caldecott Medal. He was the first picture book
artist to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, in 2003. His animated
short film 'Heads' (1979) won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin
International Film Festival back in 1980. Peter Sís lives with
his wife and two children in New York, where he designed the walls of
the subway station of 86th Street/Lexington in dazzling colours in 2004.
© international literature festival berlin
Peter Sís online: www.petersis.com | 
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