Wolf Erlbruch (30 June 1948 – 11 December 2022) was a German illustrator and writer of children's books, who became professor at several universities.
He combined various techniques for the artwork in his books, including cutting and pasting, drawing, and painting.
Erlbruch received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2006 for his "lasting contribution" as a children's illustrator.
His first assignment as an illustrator of children's books came in 1985, when he was asked by the Wuppertal publisher Peter Hammer to illustrate Der Adler, der nicht fliegen wollte by James Aggrey;[3] Erlbruch's son Leonard had just been born, and Erlbruch wanted him to be able to say, "Look, my papa made a children's book."
[7] According to Silke Schnettler, writing in the German newspaper Die Welt, the "Erlbruch-style", whose main characters are skewed and sometimes disproportionate but nonetheless recognizable, has become widely imitated inside and outside Germany.
[4] The moral of his own stories, as Schnettler in 2003 reported Erlbruch saying, is that "people should look at themselves from a distance and tolerate what is unique, strange, and sometimes not so pretty about themselves – in other words their peculiarities.
"[10] Erlbruch's illustrations for Die fürchterlichen Fünf (translated into English as The Fearsome Five) were adapted for the stage by the Landestheater Tübingen, a theatre in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.