Charlie Mackesy

About

British artist, illustrator, and the author of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. He has 600,000 followers on Facebook, 170,000 on Twitter, and 1.9 million on Instagram. In 2020, he won a Nielsen Bestseller Award.

Before Fame

He attended Radley College and Hexham Queen Elizabeth High School. He started his career as a cartoonist for The Spectator, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. An editor who'd seen his drawings on Instagram contacted him and he then published with her on Ebury. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse has spent over 100 weeks on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List top ten and is the longest Sunday Times Hardback Number One of all time. 

Trivia

Apart from his artwork and illustrations, he art co-runs Mama Buci, a honey social enterprise in Zambia, and has helped run a homeless project in London. 

Family Life

He was born and grew up in Northumberland, England. His father's grandparents were Major General Pierse Joseph Mackesy and writer Leonora Mackesy, who wrote Harlequin romances as Leonora Starr and Dorothy Rivers. 

Associated With

 He worked on the set of Richard Curtis' Love Actually and on Nelson Mandela's Unity Series project, a lithograph project working together with Mandela on the drawings he made.