Alois Carigiet (1902-1985) was a Swiss artist, stage designer, decorator, book illustrator, and the first winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize.
Alois Carigiet was born in the Swiss town of Trun, into a large farming family — he was the seventh of eleven children. He lived on a farm until he was nine years old; in 1911, he and his family moved to Chur, the capital of the canton of Grisons. In Chur, Alois graduated from the cantonal gymnasium, and then studied drawing and decorative art with the artist Martin Rath.
After completing his studies, Alois moved to Zurich, where he got a job as an intern at the advertising agency of Max Dalang, and four years later, in 1927, having achieved recognition among artists and designers, he opened his own art studio. The studio produced a wide variety of artistic works, including holiday decorations, commercial and political advertising posters, illustrations and teaching aids. Carigiet’s greatest success was the diorama he created for the Swiss pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.
From the late 1920s, Alois Carigiet began designing stage costumes, was a set designer for the Zurich City Theatre, and was one of the organizers of the Cabaret Cornichon.
In May 1939, Carigiet was walking around his native Trun and discovered a village lost in the mountains, where he felt, in his own words, “a sense of a long-lost paradise.” He left his business in Zurich and settled in the village, in a house without electricity or running water, deciding to devote the rest of his life to art. However, in 1950, he returned with his family to Zurich to give his two daughters a decent education. There he took up design again and continued to paint.
Since the early 1940s, Alois Carigiet has been illustrating children’s literature. The first book with his illustrations, “Schellen-Ursli” by Selina Schönz, was published in October 1945. It was subsequently translated into ten languages and its total circulation was about 1.7 million copies. Schönz wrote several more sequel books, six of which were illustrated by Alois Carigiet. In the 1960s, Carigiet wrote and illustrated several of his own picture books (“Zottel, Zick und Zwerg”, “Eine Geschichte von drei Geissen”, “Birnbaum, Birke, Berberitze”, etc.); in 1966, he was awarded the Swiss Children’s Book Prize for the book “Zottel, Zick und Zwerg”.
In 1966, the International Council on Books for Young People, which awards the Hans Christian Andersen Prize every two years, established an additional category for children’s book illustrators. The first winner in this category was Alois Carigiet.
Website | alois.carigiet.net
