The award-winning book The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die was published in a graphic format by Scholastic at the beginning of 2025. After the success of the book, Scholastic decided to publish it as a graphic memoir. Illustrated by the artist Victoria Stebleva, the graphic version is of a larger format and beautifully produced.
More information from hlove@scholastic.co.uk
Peter’s latest book is an extraordinary true story of his childhood. As a boy of five he was deported from a small provincial town in Hungary to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the fateful summer of 1944. His father died there of starvation, but he and his mother survived. This is a story of love, hope and survival.
This book (see Books) published at the beginning of 2023 has enjoyed a remarkable success: it has not only sold over 22,000 copies during the first year, but also was translated into several European languages. It had been shortlisted for two literary prizes: the 2024 British Book Awards and the 2024 UK Literacy Association Awards. It won the second, in the category of Information Books.
The prestige of this award is that it is the only children’s book award in which books are selected and judged exclusively by teachers.
As a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Peter has been involved in Holocaust education during the last dozen or so years; first at schools, but later at various organisation and public bodies. Last year Peter was particularly busy giving talks including in 2024:
He has been invited to talk in 2025 at:
For this work he was awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) in HM The Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2020 for Holocaust education and awareness (see Biography). He already has invitations for next year, including one to the Northern Ireland Assembly.
In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List Peter was awarded a British Empire Medal ‘for services to Holocaust education and awareness.’ The Investiture had been postponed more than once, but finally it took place on 27 September 2021 in Westminster Abbey. That some restrictions had to be observed, as a result of the pandemic, made the occasion even more moving.
On Monday 5 March 2018 a rather unusual event happened at Tate Britain. After the venerable museum closed its doors to the public, and reopened to a group of special friends, a rehearsed reading of Peter Lantos’s fourth play, Light and Shadow took place in the Tissot Room of the exhibition of Impressionists in London.
This play was written well before the exhibition was even conceived, but its presentation in a room full of Tissot’s pictures was an extraordinarily happy coincidence. The play is the story of Tissot’s extraordinary love affair with Kate Newton – the muse of many of his paintings – a beautiful, divorced, Irish Catholic with an illegitimate child. Their love survived the official prejudices of the puritanical Victorian era and only ended with Kate’s premature death. Tissot, the most successful chronicler of London’s social life left for Paris after three days of mourning, never to return.
The play was directed by Sarah Berger in the production of the So and So Arts Club. Ben Porter played Tissot, and Georgie Oulton was Kate. Other actors included Jessica Claire, Nigel Fairs, Sian E Green and George Potts.