Elizabeth Shaw remembered: New Memoir brings Irish Artist’s Story to Light
Bella Belchaud und ihre Papageien, 1970 [Bella Belchaud and her Parrots]. llustration from "How I Came To Berlin: An Artist’s Journey from Belfast and the London Blitz to a Cold-War City".
The Lilliput Press will launch "How I Came To Berlin: An Artist’s Journey from Belfast and the London Blitz to a Cold-War City" by Elizabeth Shaw, edited by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan, at Books Upstairs, near Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday, 17 September at 5pm.
This event will be the first of three public celebrations to mark the book’s publication. The launch will feature a presentation by American-Irish illustrator Margaret Anne Suggs, followed by refreshments. The event is open to the public and those interested in attending the book launch can register here.
Book launch will take place at Book Upstairs, 17 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2, on Wednesday 17 September.
Elizabeth Shaw is an Irish artist and illustrator with an extraordinary 20th century life story. Born in Belfast in 1920, with family in Sligo, she spent most of her adult life in communist East Berlin, where she moved after the Second World War. She had studied at the Chelsea School of Art, with Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland among her teachers. Her time as a student in London meant her introduction to modernism and book illustration, but was also marked by the London Blitz and encounters with exiles from various European countries. Shaw found herself as part of an international artist community that wanted to make a greater impact through their art - including the Berlin-born sculptor René Graetz. They married and moved to Berlin in 1946. Shaw initially worked as a caricaturist for Neues Deutschland and various magazines, before making her name as the author and illustrator of children’s books that have become classics within and outside former East Germany. In Ireland however, Elizabeth Shaw has remained largely unknown.
Der kleine Angsthase, 1963 [The Timid Rabbit]. llustration from "How I Came To Berlin: An Artist’s Journey from Belfast and the London Blitz to a Cold-War City".
Shaw wrote and illustrated 23 books for children, many of which have been translated into several languages. These include the story of The Timid Rabbit [Der kleine Angsthase], which was published by O'Brien Press in English, and The Little Black Sheep from Connemara, translated into both English and Irish (An tUan Beag Dubh). Many of Shaw‘s stories take on the perspective of the outsider, perhaps also informed by her own experience of migration. They address difference, prejudice, exclusion, even ageism, in an accessible, touching and humerous way - informed by the sharp eye and style of the caricaturist.
In addition to her own works, she illustrated numerous books for adults and children by authors including Bertolt Brecht, Mark Twain and Karl Marx.
Bertolt Brecht. Ein Kinderbuch, 1965. Title page. llustration from "How I Came To Berlin: An Artist’s Journey from Belfast and the London Blitz to a Cold-War City".
“By times elusive, moving and deeply revealing, this is a finely tuned, fully illustrated memoir by one of Ireland’s great forgotten artists – now illustrated with many never-before-published illustrations, a foreword by her daughter Anne Schneider, and an insightful afterword by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan which expand the under-explored aspects of Shaw’s relationship to Stalinism, the GDR, and those around her.” (Lilliput Press)
The publication of the English-language edition of Shaw’s memoir, edited with illustrations and sketches published for the first time, an afterword and list of Shaw’s works, is the first outcome of the two-year international research project, “Elizabeth Shaw’s Irish Berlin: Promoting German language and culture among adults and children through a creative approach”, funded by the DAAD, and led by Associate Professor Sabine Egger, (PI, MIC), with Apl. Professor Fergal Lenehan (Co-PI, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena) and Assistant Professor Áine McGillicuddy (Co-PI, DCU).
If you cannot make it to Dublin on Wednesday 17 September, there will be a further public event and roundtable discussion with contemporary Irish authors and illustrators in the Goethe Institute Ireland, Merrion Square, on 4 December 2025 - co-hosted by the German Embassy. Parents and children welcome! Furthermore, Elizabeth Shaw’s story will be the highlight of the 2026 Brigidsfest Berlin. Brigidsfest Berlin is an annual event, hosted by the Irish Embassy in February, celebrating Irish female creativity through literature.
The project grew out of earlier academic publications on Elizabeth Shaw as an Irish-German cultural translator and political figure by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lenehan, including a piece for RTE Brainstorm in 2021, which sparked interest by public media (RTE; BBC) and led to broadcasts on the RTE 1 The History Show and BBC Northern Ireland. Further publications with a wider reach include a public lecture as part of the MIC Arts Faculty series in 2023, an invited public lecture this November in Berlin, and the inclusion of a page on Shaw in the Goethe Institute’s online project German Traces in Ireland.
More information about the Elizabeth Shaw project and upcoming events will be available here.
