In 1988 the Dutch author and illustrator Joke van Leeuwen received the German Youth Literature Prize for her children's book "Deesje macht das schon".

Since then, the work of Leeuwen, who was born in The Hague in 1952, has been recognized with numerous national and international prizes.

A literary leitmotif is already laid out in “Deesje macht das schon” that runs through Joke van Leeuwen's work.

The story is about the inconspicuous girl Deesje, who takes the train to a half-aunt in the big city, is not picked up at the train station and now experiences an odyssey on her own.

That "Deesje does that already" is not a sad story about the neglect of children and the selfishness of adults, but a loving plea for the autonomy of childhood and for the power of imagination,

In more than 35 years, Joke van Leeuwen has created an extensive body of children's literature that is artistically exciting, original and independent.

She masterfully weaves words and images into a narrative unit.

In doing so, she uses her double artistic talent with wit, cleverness and a deeper meaning, which today's popular comic novels for children do not come close to succeeding in.

She combines a laconic, entirely unsentimental and unpedagogical tone with a wild, superficially naïve style of illustration.

Her drawings and collages, which leave out everything cute, intervene in the texts and tell them further.

She plays with the symbolism of language and exhausts the possibilities of literary and visual narration.

For example, when the first-person narrator in “Weissnich” (2014) is afraid,

that their thoughts “would turn white.

Then I wouldn't be able to read them anymore."

Even if Joke van Leeuwen enjoys living out her joy in metafiction here and in books like “Have you seen my sister?”, she never strayed from the actual addressees of her books, the children.

She has unlimited sympathy for the young protagonists, whose thoughts and emotions she traces with great empathy.

Like Deesje, they are often forgotten, overlooked, passed over or are looking for their sister, mother, father or aunt.

They never become objects of our sympathy, but despite their shy, reserved nature they are strong personalities, thrown into an unfriendly world in which they know how to assert themselves with the confidence of mental integrity and sometimes with the help of fantastic powers.

In the meantime she has written around sixty picture, children's and non-fiction books, sixteen of which have been translated into German.

The imperturbability of her childlike characters and their disarming world view keep Joke van Leeuwen's stories from slipping into melancholy and often turn them into cheerful, sometimes comical.

Today she celebrates her seventieth birthday.