Peter Sis  

Peter Sis was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1949 and attended The Academy of Applied Arts in Prague as well as the Royal Academy in London. He began making animated films in 1975, drawing each image and frame entirely by hand. In 1982, The Czech government sent him to Los Angeles to produce a film for the 1984 Winter Olympics, but when the project was cancelled and the government ordered him to return home, he decided to stay in the United States and was granted asylum.

In 1984, he moved to New York and began his career as a children’s book author/illustrator.  Since then he has received numerous awards – The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, The Society of Illustrators Gold Medal, the Caldecott Honor, among many others. In 2003, Sis was named a MacArthur Fellow in the Visual Arts.

Beyond writing and illustrating, he has contributed editorial illustrations to the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, and Esquire, and has published close to 1,000 drawings in the New York Times Book Review.

From Peter Sis:

“I did not grow up in America.  I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the country of Czechoslovakia . . . so the White House was like a dream to me. . . . The dream came true when I did a book, The Three Golden Keys (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), with the editor and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and was invited to visit the White House where I presented a painted egg to President and Mrs. Clinton in 1995.

It just shows that Dreams come true . . .”


More books from Peter Sis:

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, a Caldecott Honor Book (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus (Knopf)
Madlenka (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

www.petersis.com