Haunted House

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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. Francesca Dow, the managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s Books, confirmed that he died on Saturday morning. In London, he attended the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial school in Holland Park, where he learned Latin and Greek, before going on to King’s College, Cambridge, to study classics and English.

During the German occupation his grandmother was arrested for hiding a young British pilot and a Jewish colleague in her Warsaw apartment; she and her daughter, Jan’s aunt Zozia, were sent to Auschwitz, where they died of typhoid. Rural life on a farm was cut short, however, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The family moved to Warsaw, where his mother’s family lived, and his father worked briefly as a bailiff. When Jan was five years old, Jerzy, who had helped organise resistance groups, had to go underground for a year. After leaving university, together they founded the Gallery Five greeting cards company. [1] He began illustrating children's books in spare time but soon found it taking all his time. 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. 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.”

English Harlequins

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 also talked about his 40-year relationship with his collaborator and civil partner, David Walser, whom he met in a pub on the King's Road in West London. They contracted their partnership in Richmond on the first day this was possible in 2005. [6]

Haunted House ( Heinemann, 1979) earned Pieńkowski his second Greenaway Medal (no one has won three). [9] The librarians describe it as "the house of petrifying pop-ups". [9] The pop-up book was so successful that Intervisual Books Inc. reproduced the book as part of its 1992 Annual Report. The report noted "Haunted House was first published in 1979, and has sold 1,083,366 copies, in 13 languages, to nearly 30 countries worldwide." [10] Pienkowski’s family fled when the Russians came, and after working their way across Europe they arrived in England in 1946, eventually settling in Herefordshire. Jan attended the Cardinal Vaughan School in London and, despite knowing no English when he arrived in the country, later read English and Classics at King’s College, Cambridge. 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 moreOh 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? Jan Michał Pieńkowski (8 August 1936 – 19 February 2022) was a Polish-born British author of children's books—as illustrator, as writer, and as designer of movable books. He is best known for illustrating the Meg and Mog picture book series. [1] He also designed for the theatre. For his contribution as a children's illustrator he was UK nominee in 1982 and again in 2008 for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. [2] [3] 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.” The children’s author and illustrator Shoo Rayner added: “Sad news – Jan Pieńkowski was an inspiration to me when I was starting out.”