Helme Heine

Helme Heine (born 4 April 1941 in Berlin) is a best-selling German writer, children's book author, illustrator and designer. He currently lives in New Zealand, writing screenplays, audiobook scripts and creating satirical drawings and sculptures.

Helme (Helmut) Heine was born in Berlin in 1941. His parents ran different restaurants and hotels. Helme Heine is the brother of author and architect Ernst Wilhelm Heine. Among other places, he spent his childhood in Lübbecke and from 1953 in Wülfrath. When he graduated from high school in 1958, he had attended thirteen schools. As a student, he was characterised as "playful, non-conformist and with a broad artistic talent". He went on to study business and art.

Afterwards, in the early 1960s, although planned, he did not take over the parental hotel in a moated castle in Wülfrath-Düssel, an old, small village at the town boundary to Wuppertal. Instead he traveled through Europe, Asia, and South Africa, where he settled down and worked in Johannesburg until 1977. He created a political and literary cabaret called "Sauerkraut", ran a satirical magazine, drew and worked as a director, stage designer and actor. At the beginning of the 1970s, Heine started painting.

In 1975, Helme Heine created his first children's book, "The secret of the elephant's poohs". In the same year, he met with editor Gertraud Middelhauve on the Frankfurt Book Fair, who published the book in 1976. It won an honourable mention for the "Premio Grafico" of the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The first major success followed in 1977 with "The Pigs' Wedding".

In 1977, Helme Heine pulled up stakes in South-Africa and returned to Germany with his family. He has since published over 50 children's books which have been translated to over 35 languages. Two of them were featured in the New York Times' "Best Illustrated Children's Books of the Year": "Mr. Miller the Dog" (1980) and "The Marvelous Journey through the Night" (1991). His most famous work is "Friends" from 1982.

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