Special Price for Lifetime Achievement in Illustration
Picture book artist Antje Damm was awarded the Special Prize at the German Children's Literature Award 2025 for her lifetime achievement.
Jury statement:
"Antje Damm's extensive work is permeated by a great joy in design, curiosity and a desire to engage creatively with the world.
With inimitable openness, she experiments with a variety of design techniques – she draws and paints, builds and stages three-dimensional sets, collages, cuts, carves and photographs. As a picture book maker and question artist, she has developed her own unique formats for engaging with children: always on a level with the children, she opens up philosophical spaces and gaps, encouraging them to be curious and find their own answers, in the spirit of a deeper understanding of the world.
Whether in her innovative question books, cheeky cardboard picture books for little ones, everyday stories for primary school children, picture books from constructed worlds, or her illustrations for rhyming stories by authors such as Will Gmehling, Antje Damm has mastered the art of breaking down the big themes of our existence and trusting children to understand them. Transience and death, nature and time, loneliness and friendship are illuminated through the interplay of colour, light and shadow.
Antje Damm creates holistic book art with heart and mind, inviting readers to draw on their own wealth of experience and become creative themselves. True to her motto: ‘Children are philosophers, if you let them be.’"
Jury statement:
"Antje Damm's extensive work is permeated by a great joy in design, curiosity and a desire to engage creatively with the world.
With inimitable openness, she experiments with a variety of design techniques – she draws and paints, builds and stages three-dimensional sets, collages, cuts, carves and photographs. As a picture book maker and question artist, she has developed her own unique formats for engaging with children: always on a level with the children, she opens up philosophical spaces and gaps, encouraging them to be curious and find their own answers, in the spirit of a deeper understanding of the world.
Whether in her innovative question books, cheeky cardboard picture books for little ones, everyday stories for primary school children, picture books from constructed worlds, or her illustrations for rhyming stories by authors such as Will Gmehling, Antje Damm has mastered the art of breaking down the big themes of our existence and trusting children to understand them. Transience and death, nature and time, loneliness and friendship are illuminated through the interplay of colour, light and shadow.
Antje Damm creates holistic book art with heart and mind, inviting readers to draw on their own wealth of experience and become creative themselves. True to her motto: ‘Children are philosophers, if you let them be.’"