Nora Krug
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Berlin University of the Arts
MFA., School of Visual Arts
Nora Krug | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Krug at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2019 | |
| Born | 1977 (age 48–49) |
| Education | Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts Berlin University of the Arts MFA., School of Visual Arts |
| Occupation | Author |
| Notable work | Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home |
| Awards | National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography Schubart-Literaturpreis Evangelischer Buchpreis |
| Website | nora-krug |
Nora Krug (born 1977) is a German–American author and illustrator. Her graphic memoir Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the 2019 Schubart-Literaturpreis, and the 2019 Evangelischer Buchpreis. She is also an associate professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Krug was born in 1977 in Karlsruhe, West Germany.[1] Growing up in Karlsruhe provided what she has called "a political lession learned early", as the city is near France's Alsace region, where some towns keep old World War II tanks on display with their cannons pointed towards Germany. Seeing these displays when bicycling through Alsace as a child prompted her father to explain their historical significance to her. In her teens, she pursued interests in the violin and classical music, as well as drawing and painting.[2]
Krug attended a specialized middle and high school for classical music but chose to pursue a career in drawing at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. She returned to Germany briefly to study Visual Communication at Berlin University of the Arts but flew to North America to study in the School of Visual Arts's MFA Illustration program, majoring in Illustration as a Visual Essay.[2][3] Her thesis was a reinterpretation of "Little Red Riding Hood", consisting of four mini-books, each of which focuses on a different character from that fairy tale. She graduated with her Master's of Fine Arts degree in 2004, and the book series was added to the U.S. Library of Congress. It would lead to her first professionally-published project, Red Riding Hood Redux in 2009.[2]
While studying in New York, Krug said she began to feel ashamed of her home country because "as soon as you answer someone who asks you where you are from, the association with the Nazi period is there. You are constantly being confronted with it."[4] Although she experienced negative stereotypes towards German cultural identity, she was simultaneously asked questions about her family history she had no knowledge of. Krug later recounted that she "felt a growing urge to tackle my country's history in a new way. I realized that to overcome the collective, abstract shame I had grown into as a German two generations after the war, I needed to go back and ask questions about my family, my hometown."[5] Upon marrying into a Jewish family, she began to properly research and record her family's story during World War II.[6]
