Meet the author

Melinda Berti.

Illustrator · Italy

Melinda Berti: a Florence-based, prize-winning Italian illustrator whose warm, softly textured artwork gives picture books like A Place Just for Me their cosy, reassuring glow.

Melinda Berti is an Italian illustrator based in Florence who works for publishers in Italy and abroad and won the 2024 Sossi Prize for illustration. She loves to explore and create, and brings a little of her own world into everything she draws. In the corpus she illustrates Loredana Baldinucci's A Place Just for Me, a gentle picture book about Silver, the youngest mouse in a big, noisy family, searching for a quiet spot to call his own. Berti's warm, softly textured artwork gives the story its cosy, reassuring glow, filling burrows, dens and forest hollows with tender detail and turning a simple tale about the need for stillness into something to linger over. A lovely fit for calm, wonder-led read-alouds with 3-7s.