Anthony Browne
Anthony Browne
Anthony Edward Tudor Browne is a British writer and illustrator of children's books, primarily picture books, with nearly forty titles to his name. For his lasting contribution as a children's illustrator he won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2000, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. From 2009 to 2011 he was Children's Laureate...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth11 September 1946
children pages seen tend turn
As adults, we've seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
age close faster grew older stronger
I grew up with an older brother who was always stronger and faster and better than me at everything, but I was close enough in age to try and compete, so we had a competitive childhood.
balanced emotional life worrying
Worrying can be a kind of caring, and as such is a healthy part of a balanced emotional life.
draw
Everyone can draw when they're five. Most of us lose the ability.
age draw drawing point six talk typical
When I talk to children, I show them a typical drawing I made when I was six and point out to them that when I was their age, I didn't draw any better than any of them.
imagination meant
When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he'd be pleased.
book boys picture-books
As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.
book daddy design
Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
drawing battle paper
The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.
men two people
You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.
mother teacher brother
My dad never decided what he wanted to do; at times he fought in the army, was a teacher, a boxer, a light engineer, and a then a publican. My mum was a traditional housewife and mother. They showed my brother and I unconditional love.
lonely character childhood
A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.
children book mean
Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at proper books, which means books without pictures.
appreciation children book
I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.