Meet the author

Yvan Duque.

Illustrator · France

Yvan Duque: a French illustrator whose island-inflected, textured art gives picture books like Lucie and the Wind a sweeping, contemplative sense of the natural world.

Yvan Duque is a French illustrator working across picture books, comics and animation, whose childhood between the islands of Tahiti and Réunion left a lasting mark: oceans, forests, explorers and sweeping vistas fill his work. His textured, island-inflected art carries Grégoire Laforce's Lucie and the Wind, a quietly philosophical picture book in which a girl who collects the forest's treasures in jars meets the one thing she cannot capture, the wind, and begins to learn that nature is not a thing to be owned. Beyond books, Duque has worked as a visual development artist on animation including the DreamWorks film Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. His children's work leans contemplative and beautiful, well suited to gentle, wonder-led read-alouds for 4-8s and to grown-ups who linger over illustration.