Chris Riddell

Chris Riddell (born 13 April 1962) is a British illustrator and occasional writer of children's books and a political cartoonist for the Observer. He has won two Kate Greenaway Medals, the British librarians' annual award for the best-illustrated children's book, and two of his works were commended runners-up, a distinction dropped after 2002. Books that he wrote or illustrated have won three Nestlé Smarties Book Prizes and have been silver or bronze runners-up four times. On 9 June 2015 he was appointed the UK Children's Laureate.

Chris Riddell was born in 1962 in Cape Town, South Africa where his father was a "liberal Anglican vicar" and was opposed to the system of apartheid. The family returned to England when Chris was one year old, where he spent the rest of his childhood with his sister and three brothers who are now living in South Africa, Brighton, England, and Egypt. Chris displayed artistic talent from an early age, and was encouraged in this by his mother. (She gave him paper and pen to keep quiet during father's sermons.) As a child, he admired the work of John Tenniel, the first illustrator of Alice in Wonderland, and W. Heath Robinson. At Brighton Polytechnic he studied illustration; one teacher was Raymond Briggs, an earlier winner of two Greenaway Medals. In 2002 he named as influences Tenniel and E. H. Shepard, the first illustrator of The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh.

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