Marlenka Stupica

Biography

Marlenka's first drawings were shown to a famous relative: her paternal grandmother Ana Muck's brother, the architect Max Fabiani, praised the girl and got her into the habit of drawing.

She was born on 17 December 1927 in Maribor, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and her surname was Muck. Her full name at birth was Helena Marija.

She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana under France Mihelič and Gojmir Anton Kos. She graduated in 1950 and in those years travelled to several European countries. She began illustrating while still a student, and in 1950 she already received her first Levstik Award, the main Slovene prize for children's book illustration. The awards then came steadily: the Levstik Award in 1952, 1954, 1959, 1960 and 1970 (by other accounts 1958 rather than 1959), so that her six prizes for individual books are a record among Slovene illustrators. After the Academy she worked with the publishing house Mladinska knjiga and with the children's magazines Ciciban and Cicido. Besides books, she worked in commercial design and made scenography for puppet theatre. She was married to the painter Gabrijel Stupica; their daughter Marija Lucija also became a well-known illustrator, and later her granddaughter Hana entered the profession too. The range of authors she illustrated is wide: fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, books by Astrid Lindgren, poems and stories by Ela Peroci. Her favourite motifs are said to be landscape, water, trees and sky. I would add that this list shows what she liked doing best, but it is risky to judge from a list of motifs alone: there are too many books to check each one.

Her work was shown in exhibitions in Tokyo, Bratislava, Bologna and Rome. At the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava she received the Golden Plaque in 1969, 1971 and 1977, and the Belgrade Golden Pen in 1966 and 1973. In 1972 she was awarded the Prešeren Foundation Award for achievements in children's book illustration, and in 1994 she was placed on the IBBY Honour List.

Her later awards were for her whole body of work: the Levstik Award for lifetime achievement in 1999, the Prešeren Award in 2013 and the Župančič Award in 2019. Over more than seventy years she illustrated more than a hundred children's books and picture books.

Marlenka Stupica died in Ljubljana on 17 June 2022, at the age of 94. The Slovenian Minister of Culture, Asta Vrečko, called her one of the most prominent and recognisable women artists of the country, whose work is recognised abroad as well.