Children's Laureate, now known as the Waterstones Children's Laureate, is a prestigious position awarded in the United Kingdom once every two years to a "writer or illustrator of children's books to celebrate outstanding achievement in their field." The role promotes the importance of children’s literature, reading, creativity and storytelling while promoting the right of every child to enjoy a lifetime of books and stories. Each Laureate uses their tenure to focus on an aspect of children’s books – these have included poetry, storytelling, readers with disabilities and illustration.
Mabel Lucie Attwell was a British illustrator and comics artist. She was known for her cute, nostalgic drawings of children. Her drawings are featured on many postcards, advertisements, posters, books and figurines.
Jan Brett is an American illustrator and writer of children's picture books. Her colorful, detailed depictions of a wide variety of animals and human cultures range from Scandinavia to Africa. Her titles include The Mitten, The Hat, and Gingerbread Baby. She has adapted or retold traditional stories such as the Gingerbread Man and Goldilocks and has illustrated classics such as "The Owl and the Pussycat."
Merrion Frances "Mem" Fox AM is an Australian writer of children's books and an educationalist specialising in literacy. Fox has been semi-retired since 1996, but she still gives seminars and lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
Rosemary Wells is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. She often uses animal characters to address real human issues. Some of her most well-known characters are Max & Ruby and Timothy from Timothy Goes To School.
Nick Sharratt is a British author and illustrator of children's books, whose work is split between illustrating for writers, most notably Jacqueline Wilson from 1991 to 2021, and Jeremy Strong, but also Giles Andreae, Julia Donaldson and Michael Rosen. He was chosen to be the official illustrator for World Book Day 2006, and has illustrated around 250 books, including over 50 books by Wilson, among them The Lottie Project, Little Darlings and The Story of Tracy Beaker which was the most borrowed library book in the UK for the first decade of the 21st century. The books on which Sharratt and Wilson have collaborated have sold more than 40 million copies in the UK and sales of picture books illustrated by Sharratt exceed 10 million.
Jessie Willcox Smith was an American illustrator during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was considered "one of the greatest pure illustrators". A contributor to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Smith illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included a long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all of the Good Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
Maginel Wright Enright Barney was an American children's book illustrator and graphic artist. She was the younger sister of Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, and the mother of Elizabeth Enright, children's book writer and illustrator.
Molly Garrett Bang is an American illustrator. For her illustration of children's books she has been a runner-up for the American Caldecott Medal three times and for the British Greenaway Medal once. Announced June 2015, her 1996 picture book Goose is the 2016 Phoenix Picture Book Award winner – that is, named by the Children's Literature Association the best English-language children's picture book that did not win a major award when it was published twenty years earlier.
Deborah Mary Niland is a New Zealand–born Australian artist, known as a writer and illustrator of children's books. Some of her most popular books include Annie's Chair, When The Wind Changed, Mulga Bill's Bicycle, and Chatterbox. In 2006 she won The Children's Book of the Year – Early Childhood, with her book Annie's Chair.
The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) is a non-profit organisation to bring books and children together. In 1966, IBBY Australia was established and Ena Noël OAM became its first president and remained in this role for over 20 years.
Frané Lessac is a U.S.-born author, illustrator and painter who lives in Western Australia. She has published many children's books and won numerous awards for her illustrations.
Freya Blackwood is an Australian illustrator and special effects artist. She worked on special effects for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy from 2001 to 2003 and won the Kate Greenaway Medal for British children's book illustration in 2010.
Eloise Margaret Wilkin, born Eloise Margaret Burns, was an American illustrator. She was best known as an illustrator of Little Golden Books. Many of the picture books she illustrated have become classics of American children's literature. Jane Werner Watson, who edited and wrote hundreds of Golden Books, called Eloise Wilkin "the soul of Little Golden Books", and Wilkin's books remain highly collectible. Her watercolor and colored pencil illustrations are known for their glowing depiction of babies, toddlers, and their parents in idyllic rural and domestic settings.
Ann Catherine Stewart James is an Australian illustrator of more than 60 children's books, some of which she also wrote. She was born in Melbourne, Victoria. James has been illustrating books since the 1980s and has become a significant contributor towards the development and appreciation of children's literature in Australia. In 2000 she was awarded the Pixie O'Harris Award as a formal acknowledgment of this contribution and was also the 2002 recipient of the national Dromkeen Medal for services towards children's literature. Ann James still lives and works in Melbourne, where she runs the Books Illustrated gallery and studio that she co-founded with Ann Haddon in 1988.
Boori Monty Pryor is an Aboriginal Australian author best known as a storyteller and as the inaugural Australian Children's Laureate (2012–2013).
Barbara Reid is a Canadian illustrator and author of children's books. She has been called "one of Canada's major literary figures". In 2012, she received the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, an honour presented annually to a writer or illustrator whose body of work has been "inspirational to Canadian youth".
Sophie Jocasta Blackall is an Australian artist, author, and illustrator of children's books based in Brooklyn, New York.
Meme McDonald was an Australian writer, artistic director and advocate for Indigenous reconciliation.
Baby Bedtime is a 2013 children's picture book by Mem Fox and illustrated by Emma Quay. The book, published in America by Beach Lane Books, and published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia, is about an adult elephant getting her baby ready for bed.
