François Place: France ⋆ Illustrator

"What great fun it is to take the reader into a fictive world and then take him so far into this world that it seems real."

François Place

François Place, born in Ezanville France in 1957, began his career as an illustrator for advertising companies after studying at École Entienne, a school of art and design. After a dubious beginning, Place began illustrating children's books, including the novels of La Comtesse de Segur in 1983. Place's real talent, however, became apparent after he took the leap from illustrating non-fiction books for other authors in 1986 to writing and illustrating his own original stories, falling somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, in 1992.

Place's stories are as unusual as his ascent into illustrative success. His first triumph, Les derniers géants, relates the fictional story of an English explorer's journey and experience with a peaceful clan of giants, though the text hovers closely over non-fiction as it chronicles the impact of Western society on other cultures. His next success, L'Atlas des géographes d'Orbae, published between 1996 and 2000, is a threevolume masterpiece that mimics books of Atlases in describing 26 imaginary countries based on the letters in the alphabet.

Place has been named the "bedroom traveller" and "the architect of the imagination" because most of his stories include mysterious travel to far-away fantasy lands. His imagination is also a large part of his success, because in actuality, he has not travelled widely. Since he was a child, Place has been a prolific reader, engaging in books, maps, atlases, and engravings from all periods. His genre lies somewhere between fiction and documentary, a cross between historical/geographical realities and imaginary worlds, through which he hopes to inspire readers of all ages. Place constructs characters who rise from obscurity to become the unsung hero, though not before they are helped by a wise teacher of some kind, and in doing so, writes of human complexity along with the fragility and originality of different worlds. These imaginative landscapes are presented to the reader through various artistic forms, from pencil to brush, wash drawing and tinted ink to watercolor. His technique is varied as well, as Place tends to draw artistic insight from context of the story, which can range from meticulous detail to sprawling illustration. In whichever way Place represents a narrative, he is always successful. He is the holder of a number of awards, and made the IBBY Honor List of France as an author in 1994.