Trina Schart Hyman (April 8, 1939 – November 19, 2004) was an American illustrator of children's books. She illustrated over 150 books, including fairy tales and Arthurian legends. She won the 1985 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Saint George and the Dragon, retold by Margaret Hodges.
The art of trina schart hyman the bearded prince the sultry princess
Biography
Born in Philadelphia to Margaret Doris Bruck and Albert H. Schart, she grew up in a rural area of Pennsylvania and learned to read and draw at an early age. Her favorite story as a child was Little Red Riding Hood, and she spent an entire year of her childhood wearing a red cape.
She enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) in 1956, but moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1959 after marrying Harris Hyman, a mathematician and engineer. She graduated from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1960.
The couple then moved to Stockholm, Sweden, for two years, where Trina studied at the Konstfackskolan (Swedish State Art School) and illustrated her first children's book, titled Toffe och den lilla bilen (Toffe and the Little Car).
In 1963, the couple's daughter, Katrin Tchana (née Hyman), was born, but in 1968, they divorced, and Trina and Katrin moved to Lyme, New Hampshire. Trina lived for some time with children's writer and editor Barbara Rogasky (with whom she collaborated on several projects). For about the last decade of her life, her romantic partner was teacher Jean K. Aull. She was the first art director of Cricket Magazine, from 1973 to 1979, and contributed illustrations regularly until her death.
Many of her illustrations can be quite complex. For example, in one scene in Saint George and the Dragon, the dragon's tail stretches into the border artwork of the next page.
She is also considered one of the first white American illustrators (after Ezra Jack Keats) to incorporate black characters into her illustrations regularly, as a matter of principle, in large part triggered by her daughter's marriage to a man from Cameroon. Her grandchildren appear in several of her books.
Mother and daughter Katrin Tchana collaborated on The Serpent Slayer and Other Stories of Strong Women, retold by Katrin (2000); Sense Pass King: A Tale from Cameroon (2002); and Changing Woman and Her Sisters: Goddesses from Around the World (2006). A print portfolio was created from this book by Katrin Tchana and the Child at Heart Gallery.
Awards and honors
Hyman won the annual Caldecott Medal from the American Library Association, recognizing the year's best-illustrated U.S. children's picture book, for Saint George and the Dragon, published by Little, Brown in 1984. Margaret Hodges wrote the text, retelling Edmund Spenser's version of the Saint George legend. She also won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for picture books, recognizing King Stork (Little, Brown, 1973), text by Howard Pyle (1853–1911).
She was a Caldecott runner-up three times, for her own retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in 1984, Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel in 1990, and A Child's Calendar by John Updike in 2000. And she was a Boston Globe–Horn Book picture book runner-up twice, for All in Free but Janey by Elizabeth Johnson in 1968 and On to Widecombe Fair by Patricia Gauch in 1978.
