Wolf Erlbruch

Wolf Erlbruch (born 1948) is a German illustrator and writer of children's books. He combines various techniques for the artwork in his books, including cutting and pasting, drawing, and painting. His style is sometimes surrealist and is widely copied inside and outside Germany. Some of his story books have challenging themes such as death and the meaning of life. They have won many awards, including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1993 and 2003.

For his "lasting contribution" as a children's illustrator Erlbruch received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2006 In 2017, he was the first German to win the important Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Born in Wuppertal, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Erlbruch studied graphic design at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1967 to 1974, and worked as an illustrator for magazines such as Stern and Esquire. His first assignment as an illustrator of children's books came in 1985, when he was asked by the Wuppertal publisher Peter Hammer to illustrate Der Adler, der nicht fliegen wollte by James Aggrey; Erlbruch's son Leonard had just been born, and Erlbruch wanted him to be able to say, "Look, my papa made a children's book." Since then, he has both illustrated and written many books, and has become a professor of illustration at the University of Wuppertal.

Erlbruch tackles many adult topics in children's books, though he is not always fond of being characterized as an author for children. Some of his books have autobiographical notes, such as his Leonard (a "delightfully eccentric tale"), a book partly inspired by his then six-year-old son Leonard (now an illustrator himself), about a boy who overcomes his fear of dogs by becoming a dog himself. Many of the characters in his books, such as the mole of The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit (also known in English as The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business), have little round black glasses, such as Erlbruch has himself. He is praised for the original and surreal quality of his work. According to Silke Schnettler, writing in the German newspaper Die Welt, the "Erlbruch-style," whose main characters are skewed and sometimes disproportianate but nonetheless real recognizable, has become widely imitated inside and outside Germany.

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