Meet the author

Leo Lionni.

Writer & illustrator · United States · b. 1910

Leo Lionni: four-time Caldecott Honor master of the collage picture-book fable, whose Swimmy and Frederick remain wise, timeless classroom and bedtime staples.

Leo Lionni (1910–1999) was one of the twentieth century's masters of the picture book, an artist and designer who came to children's stories late and transformed them. Born in Amsterdam and raised across Europe, he built a distinguished career as a graphic designer and art director in Italy and the United States before, at nearly fifty, creating Little Blue and Little Yellow for his grandchildren. More than forty books followed, among them Swimmy, Frederick, Inch by Inch and Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, gentle fables of cooperation, courage and difference told through his distinctive torn-paper collage. Four of them earned Caldecott Honors. In the corpus Swimmy shows him at his finest, a tiny black fish who helps a frightened school survive by thinking differently. Lionni's quietly profound stories remain classroom and bedtime staples, as fresh and wise now as they were sixty years ago.