Kvĕta Pacovská (1928–2023)

Kveta Pacovska was born in 1928 in Prague, where she still lives and works. She graduated at the Academy of Applied Arts in 1952, after being under the tutelage of Emil Filla. She then went on to start her career as an illustrator, specialising in object books, three-dimensional tactile works and illustrations of children’s stories. Her texts have been translated into German, English, Japanese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Dutch and Chinese. She is inspired by innovation in European art, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, from Futurism to Balla and Depero and Man Ray and the Cubists. She has won many awards including the Golden Apple at the Bratislava Biennale in 1983, the Grand Prix of the Catalogna prize in Barcelona, the German Children’s Literature Prize in 1991 and the Hans Christian Andersen prize in 1992.