Thank you to our wonderful illustrators

We are so grateful to the brilliant artists whose work you can see brightening up our site and our Bookfinder.

Noted children's illustrators Kip Alizadeh, Nadia Shireen, Fiona Lumbers, Jim Smith, Erika Meza and Emily Rowland all produced images for our Bookfinder (and you might spot their drawings elsewhere on the BookTrust website too).

And thanks also go to Sarah McIntyre, whose sea monkeys are now making our error page a much happier place.

Find out more about the illustrators below.

Kip Alizadeh

Kip is a Cardiff based illustrator who graduated from Falmouth University in 2013. After graduating they lived in rural France for six months, honing their illustration skills while clearing out barns and feeding chickens. They then travelled around for a few months until they wound up in Wales where they are now busy developing their picture book style; a wonderful mix of energetic line, gorgeous characters, contemporary colour and fabulous hand lettering.

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Nadia Shireen

Nadia Shireen made homemade comics and magazines as a child. After studying law at university and then working in magazine journalism, Nadia decided it was time to pay her doodling more attention and enrolled on the MA in Children's Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art.

Her debut picture book Good Little Wolf won the UKLA Book award, was shortlisted in the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, and received a mention in the Bologna Ragazzi Opera Prima Award. Good Little Wolf was published in 2011, and was followed by the magical Hey Presto and the delightful Yeti and the Bird, all published by Jonathan Cape.

Nadia has also collaborated as an illustrator with authors such as Andrew Cope, on the hilarious Raccoon Rampage series, and Simon Puttock on the picture book The Baby that Roared, which was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize in 2012. The Bumblebear was published by Penguin Random House in May 2016, and was selected by BookTrust for their Time to Read programme in 2017. Nadia's latest picture book, The Cow Who Fell to Earth, was published by Penguin Random House in June 2017.

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Fiona Lumbers

Fiona has drawn on anything and everything from an early age and always insisted she would be an artist when she grew up. She moved to London in 2000 to study for an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. A combination of her obsession with picture books and the arrival of her first son led her down the path of illustration and she hasn't looked back since. Nothing makes her happier than splashing watercolours and inks and conjuring up new characters - often influenced by the exploits of her two sons.

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Jim Smith

After graduating with a first class degree in advertising, graphic design and illustration in 1997, Jim Smith was spotted by the owner of a small coffee shop chain and brought in to fill the walls of their flagship store with his paintings. It was a three-month contract; 17 years later, Jim is head of design at Puccino's Worldwide Ltd, now an international coffee shop franchise with stores in the UK, Europe and Egypt.

In the meantime he's illustrated kids' food packaging for M&S, drawn cartoons on the sides of PJ smoothies, created in-store graphics for Orange phone stores, designed book covers and branded a New York based Iced Tea company. In 2010, Jim launched the hugely successful Waldo Pancake range of stationery and gift products, now sold in the UK, Australia, Singapore, Europe and the US. 

I Am Not A Loser by Barry Loser, the first of a series of children's books 'spellchecked' by Jim, was published in 2012, having already sold rights to nine countries. The sequel, I Am Still Not A Loser, was the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2013 and declared the funniest book for children aged seven to fourteen. Jim has now written eight Barry Loser books and three Future Ratboys - a spin-off series of books based on Barry's favourite TV star.

Visit Jim's books website

Visit Jim's Waldo Pancake website

Erika Meza

Erika was born in colourful Mexico, fell in love with animation on the border with California, and developed a taste for eclairs in Paris before moving to the U.K. to teach drawing in Decorative Arts in NTU. A migrant, a dog person and a coffee addict, she's got a pet cat and wishes she could have a fox. She's now based in the UK and represented by Claire Cartey.

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Emily Rowland

Emily is a Graphic Design student at Central Saint Martin's in London, and she specialises in illustration and custom lettering. In her spare time she is a musician, takes film photography, cultivates tropical plants and is very into dinosaurs.

Visit Emily's website

Sarah McIntyre

Illustrator and writer Sarah McIntyre is easy to spot in her pointy glasses and hats. Her books include the comic Vern and Lettuce, four books with Philip Reeve - including Pugs of the Frozen North and Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair - and picture books like There's a Shark in the Bath and Dinosaur Police. She loves creating books and comics with friends and getting inspired by batting around ideas and drawings with them.

Sarah, who became BookTrust's Writer in Residence for six months in 2017, is immensely proud of Britain's amazing illustrators and how well their pictures tell stories. In 2015, she set up the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign, calling for people to credit illustrators for their work.

See the Sarah's Writer in Residence page

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