Creative Networks is Leeds Arts University’s major professional events programme with talks from high profile speakers from across the creative industries who entertain, challenge and inspire.

Join us as Creative Networks chat to award winning illustrator, writer and political cartoonist, Chris Riddell OBE.

About Chris Riddell

Chris Riddell, OBE, is the creator of an extraordinary range of books which have won many illustration awards including the UNESCO Prize, the Greenaway Medal (on three occasions) and the Hay Festival Medal for Illustration. As an author his work includes the highly-acclaimed Ottoline titles and the 2013 Costa Children's Book Award-winning Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse. Chris has also achieved global success through his New York Times best-selling collaboration on The Edge Chronicles with Paul Stewart and through his illustrated works with other high-profile figures including Neil Gaiman, Michael Rosen, and the comedian Russell Brand. A poetry enthusiast, he has both curated and illustrated a number of poetry collections of his own as well as illustrating poetry and lyrics by a wide range of poets and musicians. As well as publishing work with many of the world’s major publishing houses, he also enjoys creating and publishing his own eclectic range of books and prints from time to time.

Chris’s recent acclaimed illustrated editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass featured in the V&A’s immersive exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser in 2020 and also provided the Wonderland theme for the RHS’s family trail in their 2020 summer gardens.

Chris is also a renowned political cartoonist whose work appears in the Observer, the Literary Review and the New Statesman. Appointed Waterstones Children's Laureate UK in 2015 for his outstanding achievements, he said: 'during my term, I want to use the immediacy and universality of illustration to bring people together and lead them all into the wonderful world of books and reading.' He is a former president of the Schools Library Association, and an ambassador for Booktrust and Amnesty International.

Booking is essential as places are limited.

We will be in contact, prior to the event, with the zoom URL required to access the event.