Alenka Sottler (born 24 October 1958) is a Slovene painter and illustrator. She lives and works in Ljubljana as a freelance illustrator and is a member of New York Society of Illustrators. She has illustrated over 50 books for children and adults, for which she received numerous awards and honours including her second nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014.
Alenka Sottler was born in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. Her father, Gorazd Sotler, was a sculptor, a pupil of the prominent Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčič and her mother worked for Slovenia’s leading newspaper and printing company, Delo. Alenka received her first informal training in drawing and sculpture in her father’s studio. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana (1976–1981) and successfully finished her postgraduate study in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1983. From 1988, she works as freelance painter/ illustrator for the best Slovene and foreign publishers and magazines, including Mladinska knjiga, the largest and leading Slovene publisher. In 2011, she was awarded the title of Assistant Professor of Painting by the University of Ljubljana.
She has illustrated more than 50 books and produced many illustrations for children’s magazines. An important part of her output is devoted to fairytales, both modern (Oscar Wilde, Svetlana Makarovič) and classic (Folk Tales from Around the World, Brothers Grimm). Her black-white illustrations for Folk Tales from Around the World signalled her mastery and a number of awards followed. Her work is inventive, visually appealing and drawn with faultless confidence. She is contemporary in style but also well-versed in the history of visual imagery and the imagery of power, meaning and clarity. In recent years she has mainly illustrated poetry and fairytales and made original graphics/engravings for collections of poems by Malcolm de Chazal, and works on paper inspired by literature and poetry.
Today, she lives and works in Ljubljana.
Awards
2016
Illustrators 58 Gold Medal, Society of Illustrators, New York, USA
