Andersen Press

About Andersen Press

Andersen Press is an independent London publisher of picture books and children's fiction, founded in 1976 by Klaus Flugge and best known for David McKee's Elmer the patchwork elephant.

Flugge was born in Hamburg in 1934, trained as a bookseller in Leipzig and worked for the American publisher Abelard-Schuman, which sent him to London in 1961 to build its British list. When Abelard was sold he stayed in Britain and set up his own firm in 1976, naming it after Hans Christian Andersen because the name was easier to say and spell than his own. Hutchinson bought a 20 per cent stake in the new company. The first list had four books, and Tony Ross's Goldilocks and the Three Bears was an early success.

The list grew to more than a thousand titles. David McKee's Elmer and Not Now, Bernard, the Little Princess books and his long partnership with Jeanne Willis are among its best known. Melvin Burgess's Carnegie Medal winner Junk took the firm into teenage fiction, Libby Hathorn and Gregory Rogers's Way Home won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1994, and Rebecca Stead's Liar and Spy won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2013. Other authors include Quentin Blake, Ralph Steadman, Max Velthuijs and Emma Chichester Clark.

Flugge remains chairman. In November 2024 the company left Penguin Random House's Vauxhall Bridge Road building, where it had been a tenant for about 30 years, for its own offices at 6 Coptic Street, Bloomsbury, describing the move as an investment in its independence.