Oliver Jeffers

Born in Western Australia but growing up in Belfast and now resident in Brooklyn, Jeffers is a visual artist who has worked in various media, from figurative painting to sculpture and performance. It is as an author-illustrator of children’s picture books that he is best known, however, producing his debut, How to Catch a Star in 2004. This was the first picture book in the Boy series and was swiftly followed by Lost and Found, a heartwarming story in which the Boy discovers a lost penguin and attempts to return it to its home. Lost and Found won both the Nestle Smarties Book Prize Gold Medal and the Blue Peter Book Award and made Jeffers name. Two more stories in the series- The Way Back Home and Up and Down – were published in 2007 and 2010 respectively.

Jeffers has also crafted a number of standalone picture books, such as The Heart and the Bottle (2010), Stuck (2011), The Fate of Fausto (2019) and There’s a Ghost in this House (2021) as well as producing Here We Are (2017), What We’ll Build (2020) and Meanwhile Back on Earth (2022) which provide beautiful visual guides to growing up in a diverse and fascinating world. In addition to illustrating his own writing, Jeffers has illustrated many books by other authors, most notably Drew Daywalt’s bestselling Crayons series.