Jan Pieńkowski, who has died aged 85, was a most original illustrator, writer and designer of pop-up books, whose Polish childhood and experiences as a wartime refugee fed into his mesmerising work. He published more than 140 books for children and described the essence of his prodigious output simply as telling stories in pictures.
Pieńkowski’s characteristic style is immediately recognisable. For younger readers he worked in bright colours and used bold shapes. For older children, he often used a more varied palette with his trademark colourful ink washes as a background to black paper cut-outs. One of his most successful titles, in collaboration with the writer Helen Nicoll from 1972 until her death in 2012, was Meg and Mog, a series of illustrated adventures about a somewhat hapless witch and her stripy cat. Pieńkowski said in an interview that Meg and Mog gave him the opportunity to use terrible monsters from his childhood and make them into harmless toys.
He won the Kate Greenaway award in 1971 with the writer Joan Aiken for their second collaboration, The Kingdom Under the Sea. This was composed of the eastern European fairy tales that were close to Pieńkowski’s heart and featured an early appearance of his beautiful silhouette illustrations. Their first collaboration was the equally delicately illustrated A Necklace of Raindrops (1968). His interest in paper cut-outs, he said, stemmed from a wartime experience in an air raid shelter in Warsaw, where a soldier had kept the young Pieńkowski amused by cutting newspapers into wonderful shapes.
The masterful Haunted House won Pieńkowski his second Greenaway award, in 1979. This deliciously scary yet funny pop-up book changed what could be achieved through paper engineering and he went on to explore this genre with titles including the inventive and funny Robot (1981) and the thrilling Little Monsters (1986).
One or two critics questioned the frightening nature of many of his picture books, and he certainly had a tendency towards the macabre and gothic. Another inspiration for Pieńkowski was comics. As he put it, “the violence and hyperbole of the Old Testament stories found an echo in Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. They also gave me my palette.” He insisted that children like to be frightened in a safe place, although he did admit that some Slavic folk tales are pretty terrifying.
Born in Warsaw, Jan was the only child of Jerzy Pieńkowski, a country squire before the second world war, and Wanda (nee Garlicka), a scientist. It was while being cared for by a neighbour that Jan first encountered the terrifying tales about a Baba Yaga-type figure. The woman would tell him “these totally unsuitable stories, get to a cliffhanger – and stop. I used to have terrible dreams, nightmares, of this witch, always chasing me and trying to put me in a pot … I think in a way she gave birth to Meg.”
Rural life on a farm was cut short, however, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The family moved to Warsaw, where his mother’s family lived, and his father worked briefly as a bailiff. When Jan was five years old, Jerzy, who had helped organise resistance groups, had to go underground for a year.
The family then left Warsaw and travelled around Europe, including to Vienna, Italy and Germany, experiencing many hazards. They often lived in extreme hardship, and for a period they were forced to sleep in pits under train tracks. In 1946, they finally moved to Britain. Pieńkowski almost broke down when talking about this time in his life on Desert Island Discs in 2009, saying that shrill sounds and screaming still frightened him.
As a young child, Pieńkowski was taught by his mother, who encouraged his passion for drawing and making things. On arrival in Britain, aged 10, he was sent to Lucton boarding school in Herefordshire, and added English to his already fluent German, Italian and Polish. His passion for art developed further after he started life-drawing classes at the age of 13.
When the family moved to London, he attended the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial school in Holland Park, where he learned Latin and Greek, before going on to King’s College, Cambridge, to study classics and English. There he got to know Nicholas Tucker, the psychologist, critic and writer on children’s literature, and an enduring friendship began.
Although he was studying literature, even then Pieńkowski was busy illustrating for Granta magazine and designing posters for university theatre productions – in the process developing a lifelong interest in stage design. Before Cambridge, Pieńkowski had spent a couple of months in Rome, one of his favourite cities, where he discovered opera. This love of the arts was a constant in his life.
In the early days of his career Pieńkowski was employed to draw live on a BBC television children’s programme, Watch!, and it was through that work that he first met Nicoll, then the producer of the show. He also worked in book-jacket design, advertising and greeting cards.
After Nicoll died in 2012, he added further Meg and Mog titles with new stories written by his partner, David Walser. Pieńkowski and Walser, a translator, artist, musician and writer, had been together for more than 40 years when they became civil partners in 2005 – as soon as it was possible to do so – settling in Hammersmith, west London. A devout Catholic, Pieńkowski was sorry not to be able to have the union solemnised in church, although his priest said vespers for the couple.
He produced several books with religious themes, such as The First Christmas (2014) and In the Beginning (2010), the latter with Walser’s masterful adaptations from the King James bible. Other collaborations with Walser included a take on ETA Hoffmann’s original Nutcracker story (2008), The Glass Mountain: Tales from Poland (2016), and a picture book retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey (2019).
Pieńkowski was charming, good humoured and popular, with a streak of eccentricity. He was deeply attached to Britain and enjoyed life in London, but still felt close to his homeland, spoke Polish and had many Polish friends. He had a habit of picking up old discarded clothing and wearing it – probably a leftover from having had so little in the war years.
Never without a little black notebook, he was constantly drawing from life. In 2019 he was awarded the Booktrust lifetime achievement award.
He is survived by Walser.
• Jan Michał Pieńkowski, illustrator, writer and designer, born 8 August 1936; died 19 February 2022
