Meet the author

David Litchfield.

Writer & illustrator · United Kingdom

David Litchfield: British picture-book maker behind The Bear and the Piano and Grandad's Secret Giant — warm, painterly, gently magical-realist picture books for ages 4–8 with strong adult co-reading appeal.

David Litchfield is a British author-illustrator born in Bedford, best known for The Bear and the Piano (2015), his debut picture book, which won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize (Illustrated). His subsequent picture books, Grandad's Secret Giant, The Mermaid and the Shoe, Lights on Cotton Rock, share a distinctive visual signature: warm, painterly, deeply atmospheric, with strong use of light and dark and a quietly magical-realist edge. Litchfield's stories tend to land in the gentle-but-emotionally-serious register, often about loss, wonder, family or the limits of belonging. A reliable gift-shelf picture-book maker for ages 4–8, with particular appeal to adults reading alongside.