Quint Buchholz

Quint Buchholz started working as an illustrator for the magazines P.M. in 1979 and TransAtlantik in 1985, as well as for the popular German newspaper Die Zeit, which published fifteen reprints of his pictures in a literary supplement in 1988 (Die Zeit Literatur No. 41, 7 October 1988). Among the first books with covers and book illustrations by Buchholz, which were published in 1986/87, was a German translation of Jonathan D. Spence's The Question of Hu. In the years that followed, he continued painting pictures which were used for German and international novels and children's books, among others by Katherine Scholes, Amos Oz, Jostein Gaarder, Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking, Takashi Hiraide and Luis Sepúlveda. In 1991, author Gudrun Mebs and Quint Buchholz won a Gold Plaque at the Bratislava Children's Book Illustration Biennial (BIB’91) for Sara Wants to Join the Circus (Die Sara, die zum Circus will). Buchholz's breakthrough came between 1995 and 1997, when he illustrated two international bestsellers: Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, which ranked number 1 on the German magazine Der Spiegel’s bestseller list in 1995; and Nero Corleone by Elke Heidenreich, a book that became a bestseller in Germany and ranked 6th on the Spiegel's bestseller list of 1996. Nero Corleone was subsequently translated into 23 languages and received a number of awards, e.g. the Dutch children's book award Vlag en wimpel in 1997 and a Mildred L. Batchelder Award (Honors) in 1998. Buchholz has illustrated over 40 works of German and world literature, and books with pictures by him are currently available in 25 languages. A newer example is „The Alchemy of Snowness", an autobiographically inspired book written by internationally known clown Slava Polunin and published in English in 2014, featuring 27 pictures by Buchholz. The artist has created hundreds of paintings used for book covers, audio books, posters and advertisements, postcards, games, calendars and planners produced by a number of German publishing houses (e.g. Munich-based Carl Hanser Verlag, Ravensburger, Suhrkamp, Heye), as well as international publishing houses (among others, Random House, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Beisler Editore, Éditions Milan, Nórdica Libros, CIP in China, and Grimm Press in Taiwan).

Since 2008, Buchholz has been teaching painting and illustration at Irsee Monastery, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolbermoor and the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy.

Buchholz has published a number of books as both author and illustrator. One of his best-known works is the children's picture book Sleep Well, Little Bear (1993), which was translated into 10 languages and won a New York Times „Outstanding Book of the Year" award in 1994. His book The Collector of Moments (1997) was listed as "One of the ten Best Illustrated Books of the Year" in the New York Times Book Review of 1999, won a Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the Best Foreign Children's Book in 2000, as well as the Italian „Bologna Ragazzi Award" (1998) and the French „Prix Enfantaisie" (1999). In 1997, a group of international authors (T.C. Boyle, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Milan Kundera, Per Olov Enquist, Rafik Schami, Orhan Pamuk, Antonio Tabucchi, among others) wrote stories about 46 of Buchholz's pictures, to be published in Buchholz's anthology BookPictureBook. The book received one of the „Premios a los libros mejor editados en 2016", an award by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. Other major works are Quint's Life of Animals (Quints Tierleben, 2012), an anthology of international texts about animal-human relationships; a special edition of the Bible, The Bible in Images (Die Bibel in Bildern, 2010), which author Elke Heidenreich has written an extensive commentary about, and In the Land of Books (2013), a picture book about reading and books that received the Italian Premio Letteratura Ragazzi 36 award for the best-illustrated children's book in 2015. Two books with pictures by Quint Buchholz were on the Honor Roll of the Hans-Christian-Andersen Award (1992 and 1996), and five books were shortlisted for one of the most important German literary awards, the German Children's Literature Award (Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis) (1991, 1994 and 1995). Buchholz also received three awards from the German Foundation of Book Art (Stiftung Buchkunst) (1989, 1993 and 1995), and won five „Der Luchs" awards from Die Zeit/Radio Bremen between 1990 and 2004.