LAUNCH: How I Came To Berlin
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We are delighted to present the launch of How I Came To Berlin: An Artist’s Journey from Belfast and the London Blitz to a Cold-War City by Elizabeth Shaw, edited by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan. The launch will take place on Wednesday 17th September from 5pm with guest speaker, Margaret Anne Suggs as well as the book’s editors Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A deeply moving memoir from one of Ireland’s great forgotten artists, now in English for the first time.
Elizabeth Shaw, originally from Belfast, became one of the most beloved children’s authors and illustrators in East Germany, producing 23 books that remained in print after her death in 1992, and yet she is still all but unknown in Ireland. Born in Belfast in 1920, Shaw was a life-long outsider, sheltered from the poverty and violence of the city at the liberal Royal Academy. During her time at the Chelsea School of Art, she began to illustrate cartoons inspired by the social and political struggles of her time. In 1939, she was called up to the war effort and worked in the London telephone exchange. Having contributed to the London left-wing magazines Our Time and Lilliput, she exhibited works in 1943 at the Artists’ International Association in London. She married émigré artist and communist René Graetz in 1944 and decided to help build a better, socialist Germany. She worked as a caricaturist for print media, including the newspaper of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party, before going on to write enormously successful books for children, making her a household name across Germany, as well as illustrating 24 children’s books by other authors, such as Bertolt Brecht and Mark Twain, and 32 books for adults. By times elusive, moving and deeply revealing, this is a finely tuned memoir by one of Ireland’s great forgotten artists – now illustrated with many never-before-published illustrations, and with an insightful and enlightening afterword by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan, which delves into the under-explored aspects of Shaw’s relationship to Stalinism and the GDR.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Shaw was born in Belfast and lived most of her life in Berlin, where she moved after the Second World War. Lauded as one of Germany’s most popular children’s authors, she wrote and illustrated 23 books for children, many of which have been translated into several languages.
