André Letria wins National Illustration Award with ‘A Guerra’
Portuguese author and illustrator André Letria unanimously won the National Illustration Award for the book ‘The War’, the Directorate-General for Book, Archives and Libraries (DGLAB) said today.
Gathered today, the jury highlighted “the great plastic and aesthetic maturity of André Letria’s work, the quality of the object, the cadence and rhythm of the pages, as well as a safe and sensitive color palette”.
André Letria wrote this book with writer José Jorge Letria, and the jury stressed the “perfect articulation” between text and illustration, “balancing the referential and the symbolic”.
This is the second time that André Letria has won the National Illustration Award, 20 years after being recognized with ‘Verses do o-ó’, also written by José Jorge Letria. In other editions, it obtained several special mentions by other illustrated albums.
‘A Guerra’, published in 2018 with the Pato Logico seal, has gained international recognition, namely in the United States, Germany and South Korea.
With a self-explanatory title, this is a book about war, with a textual narrative that spans two dozen sentences that André Letria brought to life with a parallel and complementary visual sequence.
This year’s National Illustration Award jury also decided to award special mentions to Susa Monteiro for the book ‘Dream’ and Mariana Rio for the illustrations of ‘The House of Doctor Farnsworth’, with text by Joana Couceiro.
In this 23rd edition, 81 illustrated works were evaluated, published in 2018 by Portuguese and foreign publishers, by other entities or by author, and the jury highlighted the diversity, rigor and “the high quality of many books in competition”.
The jury integrated Andreia Brites, Luís Mendonça and Maria Carlos Loureiro.
André Letria will receive a monetary prize of 10,000 euros. The award-winning and the authors with the special mention will also receive 1,500 euros each to pay for a trip to the Bologna International Children’s Book Fair in Italy.
The award ceremony will take place on October 13 at the Folio – International Literary Festival of Óbidos.
André Letria, 46, has been working as an illustrator since 1992, having also made animation cinema and theater set design. Alongside the published work, awarded, is also editor of Pato Logico, which founded in 2010.
The long list of books ever published includes, among others, ‘Legends of the Sea’, ‘Verses of Doing-O’, ‘Fantastic Beasts’, ‘Sunday Let’s Go Light’ or ‘If I Were a Book’ – all made in partnership with his father, José Jorge Letria, but also ‘Mar’, with Ricardo Henriques, and the collection of harmonium books in his own name.
Chico Buarque, Jose Luis Peixoto, Eva Mejuto and Jose Saramago were other authors to whom André Letria illustrated.
