Meet the author

William Grill.

Writer & illustrator · United Kingdom · b. 1990

William Grill: the Kate Greenaway Medal-winning author-illustrator of Shackleton's Journey, whose coloured-pencil non-fiction set a benchmark for beautiful, gripping true adventure.

William Grill (born 1990) is a British author-illustrator who made his name with a single, remarkable debut. Shackleton's Journey, his 2014 retelling of Ernest Shackleton's doomed 1914 Antarctic expedition, won the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal in 2015, making Grill at twenty-four the youngest recipient in over fifty years. Working in delicate coloured pencil, he pairs sweeping polar vistas with meticulously researched diagrams, maps and inventories, right down to the sled dogs and exact provisions, so that narrative non-fiction becomes as beautiful to look at as it is gripping to read. His work sits at the confident, illustration-led end of children's non-fiction and reads equally well as a spellbinding story of courage and endurance and as a classroom resource on polar history and survival. A benchmark maker for the genre.