With no sense of time, a child is waiting at the tram stop, and wants to know when his mother will arrive. Trams come and go. It begins to snow. With a red nose, the child stands his ground against the wind – and finally his mother comes. The contemporary illustrator has combined an Asian pictorial tradition with his own handwritten text to present a story originally written in the 1930s in clear, poetically charged images.

The Author

Lee Tae-Jun was born in Korea in 1904 and died in North Korea in 1956. He was 21 years old when he published his first work. Until his death, he wrote for children as well as adults, and his collected works comprise many volumes. The story Wann kommt Mama? first appeared in a Korean newspaper in 1938.

The Illustrator

KIM Dong-Seong was born in 1970 in the city of Busan in South Korea. He studied art at Hong-ik University in Seoul. His first picture book was published in 1998, and he has illustrated around sixty Korean children's books to date. Wann kommt Mama? is so far the only work that has been translated into German. Kim Dong-Seong lives with his family in Seoul.