Haunted House

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For some years Pienkowski worked as a freelance designer and illustrator for advertising companies and publishers, designing wallpaper for Coloroll and doing graphics for the BBC children’s TV series Watch! a b c "Jan Pienkowski". Broadcast episode recording (45 minutes). Desert Island Discs, Sunday, 18 October 2009. BBC Radio4. Retrieved 1 December 2012. After Nicoll died in 2012, he added further Meg and Mog titles with new stories written by his partner, David Walser. Pieńkowski and Walser, a translator, artist, musician and writer, had been together for more than 40 years when they became civil partners in 2005 – as soon as it was possible to do so – settling in Hammersmith, west London. A devout Catholic, Pieńkowski was sorry not to be able to have the union solemnised in church, although his priest said vespers for the couple.

Jan Pienkowski". Broadcast episode notes (recording not available). Private Passions, Sunday 14 December 2008, 12:00 (one hour). BBC Radio3. Retrieved 1 December 2012. Until he was eight the family lived in a village in a part of western Poland, annexed by Germany in 1939, where his father had a job as a bailiff on a country estate. He illustrated for Granta magazine and designed posters for university theatre productions. At the beginning of his career, Pieńkowski was employed to draw live on the BBC children’s programme Watch!, before the book world discovered him. There was an impatience and wonderful curiosity to him, as he looked for new ways to tell stories: drawing on his Polish roots with his cut-out and silhouette work; his extraordinary use of colour; his pioneering interest in drawing on the computer; and of course his award-winning pop-ups which challenged publishers and printers to find new ways to create his books.”Oh no! A flood means that Christmas is looking doomed! Enter a spell, a surprise stay in a castle and a party to plan for - will Meg, Mog and Owl make it home for a very special Christmas Day? He added: “Full of love, curiosity, art, thought, enjoyment and laughter. He will be much missed, as a man, and as a towering figure in children’s books.” Original artwork, drawings, paintings, silhouettes, ceramics and signed books for sale from Jan Pienkowski and David Walser. He died from complications of dementia on 19 February 2022, at the age of 85. [14] [15] The Booker Prize trophy [ edit ] After leaving university Pieńkowski founded the Gallery Five greeting cards company. He began illustrating children's books in his spare time, but soon found the work taking over all his time. He began working with children's author Joan Aiken in 1968; he later won the first of two Kate Greenaway Medals in 1972 for his illustrations for Aiken's The Kingdom Under the Sea.

Styles, Morag (20 February 2022). "Jan Pieńkowski obituary". The Guardian . Retrieved 21 February 2022. Jan Michel Pieńkowski is a Polish-born British illustrator and author of children's books. He is probably best known for his Meg and Mog books with writer Helen Nicoll and for his pop-up books, including Haunted House (winner of the 1980 Kate Greenaway Medal), Robot, Dinner Time, Good Night and seventeen others. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that Jan never treats children as children,” Walser said a few years ago. “It wouldn’t occur to him to talk down to them, he just behaves perfectly normally … When he works with children, he’s one of them.”animals, including a Gorilla, Tiger and Shark, pop out at you in vibrant colours in that teaches young children about the food chain in this chiling tale. Find out more Pieńkowski has had a life-long interest in stage design. He was commissioned to provide designs for Theatre de Complicite, Beauty and the Beast for the Royal Ballet, and Sleeping Beauty at Disneyland Paris. Being Polish under the Germans, Jan was not allowed to attend school. So his mother taught him to read and write and his father encouraged him to draw, while a next-door neighbour would read him fairy tales, “always stopping at a cliffhanger” to get him to drink his boiled milk.

The British author Ed Vere, who is godson to Walser, said: “Jan Pieńkowski lived an inspiring life dedicated to making books of the very highest standard – pioneering, intelligent, beautifully considered, and always created with a mischievous sense of fun.”One or two critics questioned the frightening nature of many of his picture books, and he certainly had a tendency towards the macabre and gothic. Another inspiration for Pieńkowski was comics. As he put it, “the violence and hyperbole of the Old Testament stories found an echo in Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. They also gave me my palette.” He insisted that children like to be frightened in a safe place, although he did admit that some Slavic folk tales are pretty terrifying. He began making silhouettes almost by chance. Early in his career he had done a sample drawing to show a publisher, but, unhappy with the faces, he inked them in, and the drawing was accepted. These included, in the 1970s, his own Fairy Tale Library – the six miniature books being designed to be “small enough for a child’s hand” with a text translated from the original Perrault and Grimm by Pienkowski’s long-term partner, David Walser. Pieńkowski was also twice the UK nominee – in 1982 and 2008 – for the international Hans Christian Andersen award, the highest recognition available to creators of children’s books.

The Booker Prize trophy: the story behind our distinctive statuette". The Booker Prizes . Retrieved 6 February 2023. Meg and Mog, completed in collaboration with the late writer Helen Nicoll, was a series of illustrated adventures about a hapless witch and her stripy cat.After Nicoll died in 2012, Pieńkowski worked on new Meg and Mog titles with his civil partner, David Walser, a translator, artist, musician and writer. Odysseus must battle his way home from war with the Greek Gods pitted against him. But what will he find when he gets there? The origins of his style came from Pienkowski’s memories of paper cut-outs, a traditional art form in Poland, where he was born on August 8 1936. “As a child, I would sit at the table cutting paper decorations for Christmas, and at Whitsun it was the custom for a local paper cutter to come to the house to make new paper curtains for the kitchen,” he recalled. “I loved watching, especially when she unfolded it all.”