Down the Kitchen Sink

Val was born Balint Stephen Biro, in the city of Budapest, in Hungary, on the 6th October 1921. He attended a small primary school till he was eleven, when he entered a large school of seven hundred pupils run by the monks of the Cistercian order. It was one of the three great monastic schools of Hungary.

The politics of the mid thirties, dominated by the rise of Nazism and Fascism slowly came to increasingly influence the people of Hungary and Val's father, recognizing what was happening, arranged in 1939, for his eighteen year old son to go to London to study art. Val never saw his father again. Val hero worshipped his father who sadly died in 1944 only two days before the Gestapo called to arrest him as a political suspect. Val left for England in July 1939, and stayed at Polperro with the McCloy family whose son had spent the previous summer with the Biro's in Budapest. Val was required to register in September as an 'Enemy Alien' with the police.

Val Biro lives in West Sussex with his wife. He was born in Hungary and trained as an artist in Budapest before coming to London to study at the Central School. He worked in publishing before coming a freelance illustrator and starting this popular series.

Val designed 30 book cover illustrations for Nigel Tranter's, 'Scotlands Storyteller', books between 1951 and 1980.

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