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Working name of Hungarian-born illustrator and author Balint Stephen Biro (1921-2014), in the UK from 1939 until his death. During his prolific career as a book illustrator, which began in the early 1940s – his woodcut illustrations for Paul Tabori's Private Gallery (coll 1944) are already extremely accomplished – he executed a number of covers for sf and fantasy books, though never in a style that demonstrated any deep affinity for the iconography of the fantastic, though the cover and illustrations for Escape from the Zoo (1945), first volume of the series by Richard Parker, are winning. In his later career, he compiled and illustrated several volumes of fairytales, like including Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (coll 2005), a Treasury of Aesop's Fables (coll 2007) and Tales from the Arabian Nights (coll 2013) [these are not given in the Checklist below]. His long series of picture books for younger children, the Gumdrop sequence, included one tale of sf interest, Gumdrop and the Martians (graph 1998). [JC]
born Budapest, Hungary: 6 October 1921
died West Sussex: 4 July 2014
works
series
Gumdrop (highly selected)
links
Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 00:25 am on 27 April 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/biro_val>