Alenka Sottler: Slovenia ⋆ Illustrator

Alenka Sottler was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1958, and grew up among a family dedicated to the arts. Her father was a sculptor, while her mother worked for a leading newspaper and printing company. Alenka first learned to draw and sculpt in her father's studio, where she cultivated a love of art that would take her through both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1988, Sottler began to work as a freelance painter and illustrator for Slovenian and foreign publishers and magazines, including the largest Slovenian publisher, Mladinska knija. Since then she has illustrated more than 45 books, with a particular flair for fairytales. She has won many awards, including the Hinko Smrekar Award at the Biennial of Slovenian Illustration, and awards from other countries such as Japan, Croatia, and Italy, as well as five certificates of Merit from the Annual Exhibition in New York, and she made the IBBY Honor list in 2008. She has received other accolades for her work, most prominently for her illustrations in Folk Tales from Around the World.

Sottler often takes risks and experiments with her craft. Her artistry steadfastly displays an awareness of the importance of artistic freedom of expression. Her style is contemporary, with subtle elements of modernist painting tradition reminiscent of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance. She is an extremely with precision and consistency, allowing her images to adhere to a system and form their own personal narrative.

Alenka Sottler has illustrated many children's classics and cultural stories and fairytales, and has also brought to life the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde by incorporating her own artistic style and technique to the texts. Sottler's colorful, contemporary style has also illustrated distinctly Slovenian cultural texts—works by poets and authors such as Oton Župančič and Grigor Vitez—and her artistic contributions to these canonical works prove that illustration is an important aspect of Slovenian literature and culture.