Featured Storyteller : Oliver Jeffers

Oliver Jeffers has won various awards and enchanted millions of kids and parents alike with his alluring hand illustrated stories. Jeffers's picture books are amazingly handy. They explore themes of friendship, loneliness, self reliance and imagery.

He has written and illustrated, or "made", as he chooses to put it, five famously rewarding picture books. The first three - the "boy books" - show a small boy who sets off on a series of baffling adventures. How to Catch a Star (2004), the first of them, was influenced by a Brer Rabbit story he read as a child. In Lost and Found (2005) the boy valiantly travels to the south pole for a sad penguin, and in The Way Back Home (2007) he saves a young Martian whose spaceship has crashed on the moon.

The Heart and the Bottle is utterly facinatig for its valuable message and the wisdom of how that is conveyed in words and pictures. This is a book to return to time and time again.

Jeffers was born in Australia in 1977 and brought up in Belfast. He studied visual communication at the University of Ulster, and graduated in 2001. Jeffers became ardent about making picture books when he began to understand the subtle relationship between words and pictures – ‘that was what excited me. Until I got really involved, I hadn't realised how just a few words can completely change the meaning of a picture.’ Now living in New York, he works as a painter, designer, printmaker and installation artist, but remains very busy making picture books.

Personal Stuff:
Oliver loves plastic food, suitcase handles and Elvis, and has developed a bizarre habit of endlessly writing lists he never reads. He remains hell bent on travelling all over the world.