Uri Shulevitz

Uri Shulevitz was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. He began drawing at the age of three and never stopped. He was four years old when Nazi Germany invaded in World War II. The family fled the city and spent eight years wandering across thousands of miles in Europe, eventually arriving in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books. He won first prize in an elementary school drawing competition in Paris's 20th arrondissement. In 1949, the family moved to Israel. Shulevitz worked at a variety of jobs, including as an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Tel Aviv Art Institute. At age 15, he was the youngest artist to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. During the 1956 Suez-Sinai War, he joined the Israeli Army. In 1959, he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and worked as an illustrator for a Hebrew children's book publisher. In 1962, an editor at Harper & Row saw his freelance portfolio and suggested he create children's books. He published his first picture book, The Moon in My Room, in 1963.

Since then, he was written and illustrated many celebrated children’s books. He won the 1969 Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure (1978), Snow (1998), and How I Learned Geography (2008). Also among his more than 40 books are One Monday Morning, Dawn, and So Sleepy Story. In 2020, he published a memoir called Chance: Escape from the Holocaust: Memories of a Refugee Childhood.