Jeanette Winter, with more than 65 picture books to her credit, died November 7. She was 86.
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Her works include The Snow Man; The Little Owl & the Big Tree: A Christmas Story; Oil; The Secret Project; and Diego (all written by Jonah Winter); as well as her own books Follow the Drinking Gourd; The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq; Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia; Nasreen's Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan; and Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet, which has been translated into 21 languages.
"Jeanette Winter was bold and fierce and yes, stubborn, and she was a visionary," said Allyn Johnston, v-p & publisher of Beach Lane Books and Winter's longtime editor. "I didn't know these things about her initially, but I had long admired her work from afar, and our shared love of Mexican folk art finally brought us together with her 1996 book, Josefina, about renowned clay sculptor Josefina Aguilar. We went on to do 25 more books together on real-world topics."
Johnston recalled that soon after their first project together, Winter stopped doing sketch dummies, feeling that they took the spontaneity out of her pictures. "So she would write and illustrate a whole book, and when she was done, a package would arrive with a manuscript and all of the gorgeous finished art inside," she said. "Inevitably, though, one image or another would not quite be working, and I would have to ask for revisions. This did not always go well because she had very strong feelings about what she had made, and because I often did not address the situation in a timely enough manner--eek. But eventually, book after book, year after year, we would push through our frustrations with each other--and figure it out together."
Last May, Winter completed and sent Johnston a new book inspired by the loss of her family's 89-year-old house in the Los Angeles fires "and a story I'd told her about the calla lilies that had reappeared in the burned garden only a few months after the fire," she said. "To her it was a story of hope, but I could barely face looking at it because it was so personal to me. It wasn't really written for children, and I didn't see a way to suggest revisions that would make it work as a picture book. I will always regret that we didn't do our usual thing and talk our way through it and figure it out together. But you can bet I am going to go back into that fire project of hers, in the hope that there is indeed a picture book waiting inside it, biding its time before bursting out into the world, like those stubborn and beautiful calla lilies that inspired it."
Winter is survived by her husband of 65 years, artist Roger Winter; her children's book author and poet son, Jonah Winter (and his wife, Sally Denmead); and her poet and film critic son, Max Winter.