Meet the author

Quentin Blake.

Writer & illustrator · United Kingdom · b. 1932

Sir Quentin Blake: the defining illustrator of Roald Dahl's children's books and a first-rank picture-book maker in his own right — the loose, scratchy line that has shaped British children's publishing for fifty years.

Sir Quentin Blake is a British illustrator born in 1932, one of the defining visual voices in modern children's books and the first Children's Laureate (1999–2001). He is most famous as the illustrator of Roald Dahl's children's books (The BFG, Matilda, The Twits, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Witches), their joint output is generationally inseparable. Blake also writes and illustrates his own picture books: Mister Magnolia, Mrs Armitage on Wheels, Clown, All Join In, Zagazoo. His linework is loose, scratchy, immediate, and deceptively expressive, a visual register that has become synonymous with Dahl's voice and with a particular flavour of warm-but-anarchic British children's publishing. Knighted in 2013 for services to illustration.