Anthony Browne
Anthony Browne
Anthony Edward Tudor Browne is a British writer and illustrator of children's books, primarily picture books, with nearly forty titles to his name. For his lasting contribution as a children's illustrator he won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2000, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. From 2009 to 2011 he was Children's Laureate...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth11 September 1946
larger
I use a little brush only for really small details. Over the years, I've started to use a much larger brush.
bit felt outsider work
I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash.
art good imagine job medical operations
After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.
dreams mysterious stories
Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.
afterwards bit stories
Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.
agency children continue government medal says whose writer
Children will come out and listen to a writer whose books they like. They don't need a government agency or a medal that says 'laureate' to continue that.
age played player rugby unlikely until
I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player - small, quiet, long-haired and 'wiry.'
book boys picture-books
As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.
book daddy design
Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
drawing battle paper
The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.
men two people
You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.
mother teacher brother
My dad never decided what he wanted to do; at times he fought in the army, was a teacher, a boxer, a light engineer, and a then a publican. My mum was a traditional housewife and mother. They showed my brother and I unconditional love.
lonely character childhood
A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.
children book mean
Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at proper books, which means books without pictures.