ARTIST

エリザ・ピオトロヴスカ

Eliza Piotrowska
Poland

I design books – home for words and images.

Writing children’s books is for me so much more than just storytelling. It is a kind of game playing with a language, which is not so much a communication tool but a creative search. New words and new meanings do not have to be grammatically correct, they may contain errors, because the “error” area is in fact the area of the new language.

My inspiration are children who do not yet speak the language perfectly and in order to express their needs create new forms, which might not be correct from a grammatical or traditional perspective, but surprisingly accurately reflect the essence of things.

Creating illustrations is also creating a new language. The “conversation” between word and image can take many forms. Paradoxically, the bigger the distance between the image and text, the deeper the relation to be discovered.

On one hand text and illustration live separate lives, on the other – they meet in a book. The book is their home.

CV

Eliza Piotrowska – born in 1976 in Poland, author and illustrator of over two hundred books for children, audiobook voiceover, translator of children books from Italian, art critic.

At the end of the 1980s, she was noticed and guided by famous Polish poet Danuta Wawiłow, thanks to whom her poems began to appear in magazines for children and youth and anthologies of young poets. In the 1990s, she was a member of the KLAN, an organization founded by Danuta Wawiłow, associating young, talented poets from all over Poland.

A graduate of the Art History Department of the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań and Università La Sapienza in Rome.

In the beginning of 2000s, an employee of the National Museum in Poznań, where she created the Children’s Museum Academy, a well-recognized and awarded cultural education initiative.

She collaborates with the most important children and adults’ magazines dedicated to children’s literature.

Her books are translated into many languages, among others: German, Spanish, Korean, Czech and her most famous series “Aunt Jadzia” is played in the theater and currently produced as an animation.

The most popular series:
Aunt Jadzia
Bioobooks
Saints Smiling
Retro Objects

In 2023 she organized Aunt Jadzia Festival, which gathered thousands of fans.

 

The most important awards:
Sybilla 2002 – Museum Educational Eevent of the Year
Mały Dong 2011– for book: Yellow circles
Feniks 2012 – for book: Urszula Ledóchowska (Saints Smiling)
Żółta Ciżemka 2018 – for book: Wojtek, soldier without uniform
Feniks 2018 – for book: Wojtek, soldier without uniform
Feniks 2020 – for book: The Story of Wanda Błeńska