Johanna Angermeyer

Johanna wrote and illustrated two children’s books about the Galapagos. "Is Your Mama an Iguana" and "How the Booby got its Feet". In 2015 the author and her husband moved to Vilcabamba, Ecuador. Here in this peaceful valley Johanna continues to write and illustrate books.

In 1971 she and her family moved to Santa Cruz Island. Johanna sold paintings, worked as a cook aboard a yacht and then as a guide on cruises around the archipelago.

In 1960 the family moved back to Quito. Young Johanna dreamed of reaching the Galapagos and learning more about the father she never knew. In 1961 her family made the four-day voyage from Guayaquil to Santa Cruz in the Galapagos. There Johanna fell in love with her larger-than-life uncles and the pioneering lifestyle but, aged thirteen, she reluctantly returned to school in Quito.

Johanna was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and her widowed mother moved their family to California in the 1950s. Bored at school, eight-year-old Johanna received most of her education roaming the public library where her mother worked in the children’s book section.

Johanna Angermeyer, American-born author and artist, (born 1948) is the author of the critically acclaimed My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest (now in its 9 reprint) and children's picture books, (illustrated by the author): "Is Your Mama An Iguana?" and "How The Booby Got Its Feet". An exhibiting artist and lecturer on Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, the author lived for many decades in the UK but has now moved back to Ecuador.

In 1939 Emmasha met Johannes Angermeyer, one of the first settlers on the Galapagos Islands, in Ecuador. They married, had a daughter Mary, and planned to live in the remote islands. However, in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, all American civilians in Ecuador were repatriated. It was during this enforced separation, with her mother in the USA, that Johanna was born. Shortly afterwards her father in Ecuador, unable to return to his island, sickened and died.

In 1936 Emmasha, Johanna Angermeyer's Russian American mother, married Capitan Marco Aguirre, an aristocrat and famous aviator, whom she met in Lincoln, Nebraska, when he attended the Charles Lindbergh Flying School there. In 1938 his plane crashed in the Andes while he was rushing to Emmasha’s side after she gave birth to their son.

Angermeyer's father Johannes Angermeyer and his four brothers, all artists and musicians, sailed from Hitler’s Germany in 1935 to the Galapagos but, after shipwreck off the coast of England, only four of the five made it to the then sparsely inhabited Enchanted Islands where they lived like Robinson Crusoes.