 |
 |
 |
 |
Author and illustrator Edward Ardizzone was born October 16th, 1900, in Haiphong, French Indonesia (now Vietnam). He moved to England when he was five years old. As a child, he and his cousin Arthur explored the docks together and were given free run with he sailors. These experiences were the basis of his “Tim” books.
In 1926, his father gave him a sum of money so that he could devote all his time to art. His first commission was for forty drawings for Johnny Walker, the whiskey distillery. Ardizzone developed his writing style from telling stories to his children and later his grandchildren. Oxford University Press published Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain in 1935 with great success. During the course of his fifty-year career, Ardizonne wrote and illustrated about twenty books for children and edited and illustrated two volumes of classic fairy tales. He won the first Kate Greenaway Medal in 1956 for Tim All Alone.
He died in 1979.