NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Anke Feuchtenberger was born in 1963 in East Berlin and is one of Germany’s leading comic illustrator/ artists. Her award winning work has been published in numerous books, newspapers, magazines and anthologies, and includes paintings, drawings, comics, posters, prints, costumes and puppets.

Her illustrations and comics are rendered in highly recognizable style, often featuring naked, childlike creatures with huge heads,  wandering through strange, dream-like landscapes. Her haunting stories are a mixture of nightmare and fairytale.  She is currently a professor of arts at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Hamburg.

We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal recently, and talk here about babies and politics, how election posters gave her her first big break, utopia, the difference between East and West Germany, loneliness, vertical newspaper columns, her complicated comics, graphic novels, Edward Munch, Kafka, her success outside the borders of Germany, and Super Tear, her babushka superhero.  

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Barbara Reid’s Plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children’s book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony tails, playing hooky and war.

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