Elizabeth Shaw was one of the most celebrated children’s au­thors in East Germany, producing a series of masterful children’s books that have stayed in print since her death in 1992. She was also a deeply complex, passionate woman, a brilliant author, and a gifted artist beyond the confines of Children’s literature.

Born in Belfast in 1920 to Irish parents, Elizabeth Shaw was a life-long outsider, sheltered from the poverty and violence of the city by a liberal upbringing. At the age of 12, her family moved to England, where she would eventually go on to attend the Chelsea School of Art, impressing her teachers and absorbing the social and political struggles of her time. In 1939, she was called up to the war effort in the Lon­don telephone exchange. 

A cartoonist and illustrator to left-wing magazines in the early war years, In 1944, she met the Swiss-born émigré artist and communist René Graetz. They married in 1946 and, like other German exiles opposed to National Socialism, decided to help build a better, socialist Germany. Deeply inflected by the pol­itics of East Germany, she worked as a caricaturist at the newspaper of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party, before going on to write 23 enormously successful books for children, making her a household name across Ger­many. 

Foreword by her daughter Anne Schneider, and an insightful afterword by Fergal Lene­han and Sabine Egger which expand the under-explored as­pects of Shaw’s relationship to Stalinism, the GDR, and those around her.