Krystyna Lipka-Sztarbałło was born in 1949 in Warsaw, where she obtained a degree in interior design in 1974. After graduation, she worked in the fields of architecture, exhibition and set design, fashion design, and applied graphic arts. In 1989, she began her adventure with illustration and has remained true to this passion to this day.
Lipka-Sztarbałło received 1st Prize at the Poznań Biennal of Art for Children for the graphic design of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The illustrations were an attempt to combine a painting sketchbook with a comic strip narrative, and one of the chapters was designed to unfold like a pop-up book. Though the project never saw the light of day, the artist had plenty of other projects to keep her occupied. Her illustrations were included in more than 30 books, a total of 15 Polish and 16 foreign textbooks. They are mainly known in Korea (Maps Tell Us, The Dream That Went Away, The Balloon Sailors, Little Viking), Germany (Eine Geschichte Gelbe, Wo ist mein Traum?), Canada and the United States (The Balloon Sailors).
The artist draws inspiration from the surrounding world. She admits that she builds on the experience of book designers from the 1960s, but stylistically – in terms of composition and narrative – she feels like a child of the 1970s. She deals not only with conventional fairy tales and abstraction, but also with non-fiction books, like Where To Go? Maps Tell Us by Heekyoung Kim, an educational journey in the world of cartography. This publication, repeatedly awarded in Korea, was on the list of the one hundred most beautiful books in the world in the 4th edition of the CJ Picture Book Award competition in 2011. Its German edition received the Book of the Month award from the German Academy of Literature for Children and Youth and was nominated for the prestigious Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2012.
Lipka-Sztarbałło’s illustrations do not just contribute to the content, but constitute an independent visual story.