James Krüss

James Krüss (31 May 1926 – 2 August 1997) was a German writer of

Krüss was born as the son of the electrician Ludwig Krüss and his wife Margaretha Krüss (born Friedrichs) in Heligoland. In 1941, during World War II, the inhabitants of the island were evacuated to Arnstadt, Thuringia, later to Hertigswalde, near Sebnitz, Saxony. After finishing high school in 1943, he studied to become a teacher, first in Lunden until 1943, Schleswig-Holstein, then in Ratzeburg until 1944, then finally in Brunswick. In 1944, he volunteered to serve in the air force and was stationed in Ústí nad Labem, now in the Czech Republic, at the end of World War II. From 1945 on he lived with his parents in Cuxhaven.

Career

In 1946, he published his first book, Der goldene Faden and then visited the college of education in

In 1965, he bought a house in Gran Canaria and settled there a year later. At the end of his life, Krüss had heart problems and spent a lot of time in clinics. In 1968 Krüss received the Hans Christian Andersen Award conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People, the highest recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children's books.

He died in 1997 in

Legacy

Krüss was first and foremost a storyteller, whose fantastic and whimsical tales are deeply rooted in folktale and oral storytelling tradition. Many of his books are actually collections of tales held together by a frame story. Such is the case with My Great Grandfather and I (1959), for which he received the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Prize for Children's and Youth Literature), with its sequel My Great Grandfather, the Heroes, and I (1967), and The Lighthouse on the Lobster Cliffs (1956).^[3]

Krüss was the best known and most prolific children's author in what was for nearly all his writing life the

• 2013 Joke van Leeuwen^[5]
• 2015
  Frank Cottrell Boyce^[6]
• 2017 Andreas Steinhöfel^[7]
• 2019 Frida Nilsson^[7]

References