From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since November 2006.

Chris Riddell is a British illustrator (and occasional writer) of children's novels, and a political cartoonist for The Observer.

Chris Riddell was born in 1962 in South Africa where his father worked as a Vicar. The family returned to England when Chris was 1 year old, where he spent the rest of his childhood with his sister and three brothers. Chris displayed artistic talent from an early age, and was encouraged in this by his mother. As a child, his favourite artists were John Tenniel (the original illustrator of Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland) and William Heath Robinson .

Chris has won several awards for his work, including the 2002 Smarties Book Prize Silver Award and the 2002 Kate Greenaway Medal for the acclaimed non-fiction book Pirate Diary (written by Richard Platt) and the 2004 Kate Greenaway Medal for Jonathan Swift's Gulliver (retold by Martin Jenkins). He was highly commended for the same award in 2001 for Castle Diary. [1]

Some of Riddell's most notable work is The Edge Chronicles, a children's book series co-written with Chris by Paul Stewart and illustrated by Riddell himself. These books are set in a fictional world known simply as The Edge. They consist of several "sagas" - The Twig Saga, The Quint Saga and The Rook Barkwater Saga. They have been praised for Chris's beautifully detailed line drawings and the unique nature of their collaborative writing process.

Other books illustrated by Chris Riddell include Fergus Crane, Corby Flood, and Hugo Pepper; all set in the same world. These books were also co-written with Paul Stewart. He also illustrated Muddle Earth with him.