Chris Riddell

Chris Riddell (born 13 April 1962) is a South African-born English illustrator and occasional writer of children's books and a political cartoonist for the Observer. He has won three 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. Life 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 now live in South Africa, Brighton, and Egypt. He attended Archbishop Tenison's Grammar School in Kennington. 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 his father's sermons.) As a child, he admired the work of Sir 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. Riddell worked as an illustrator at The Economist in the 1980s, and at the Observer starting in 1995.