Walter Scherf, Director of the International Youth Library

Walter Scherf

A lecturer and translator, Walter Scherf was director of Munich’s International Youth Library when he became a member of Cricket’s Editorial Advisory Board.

Born in 1920, Scherf studied Physics, Minerology, and Musicology at the University of Göttingen from 1946 to 1949. Following graduation, he worked as a typesetter, editorial journalist, lecturer, and publishing house manager, translating the first German edition of Tolkien's The Hobbit, published in 1957. From 1957 to 1982, Scherf served as the director of the International Youth Library.

After he retired in 1982, he continued studies he had begun in the 1960s in Education, Psychology, and Folklore, graduating in 1986 with a thesis on the form and function of gruesome fairy tales. Scherf published a two-volume fairy tale encyclopedia in 1995 and lectured in folk narrative research in Innsbruck and Munich until 2001. 

For his works about fairy tales, Walter Scherf won the Europäischer Märchenpreis.