Michael Foreman (author/illustrator) - Career

Career

After graduating, he lectured at Saint Martins School of Art in London; later moved to Chicago, where he worked as Art director of something; and later returned to London and worked as Art Director of King.

In 1967 he returned to lecturing, and has since worked in London at the Royal College of Art, the London School of Printing and the Central School of Art.

His career as an illustrator began in 1961 when he illustrated Comic Alphabets: Their origin, development, nature, written by the lexicographer Eric Partridge and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. That year he also debuted in the children's market, as did author Jane Charters, with a picture book, The General, also published by RKP. In 2010 he recalled: "My first book, The General was about a general who made his country the most beautiful in the world instead of the most powerful. Fifty years on, it seems even more relevant as the threat to the environment, hinted at in The General, (not to mention the threat of war) is now plain to see — even by politicians." Charters recalled that "we wanted to produce a fun and lively story for children, but one to encourage a sympathetic outlook on the world."

Over the years Foreman has illustrated books by Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as writing and illustrating his own books. He has designed Christmas stamps for the British Post Office, and has regularly contributed to American and European magazines.

According to ISFDB he also illustrated some books as "Mike Foreman"; that database credits him with three 1971 reissues of James Branch Cabell novels by Tandem Fantasy.

Foreman has over 180 books to his name including many written by Michael Morpurgo. His own stories often focus on conflict and war. The autobiographical War Boy: A Country Childhood, which combines photographs and adverts with watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings, was exhibited at the National Army Museum in 2010. The colorful War and Peas is about a king, depicted as a lion wearing a suit of armor, who begs food from a rich nation, only to have to battle the Fat King's army men amid towering piles of oversized food. The book can be seen as a parody of the struggle between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Penni Cotton notes in Picture Books Sans Frontières the way that Foreman has the king and his impoverished subjects appear washed-out and faded in the beginning.

He won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject, both in 1982 and in 1989 and he was a commended runner up five times (Highly Commended in 1980). The 1982 Medal recognised two books, the last multiple citation: Long Neck and Thunder Foot by Helen Piers (Kestrel) and Sleeping Beauty and other favourite fairy tales (Gollancz), a collection of traditional stories edited and translated by Angela Carter. Carter and Foreman also won the first two "Emils", the Kurt Maschler Award annually (1982 to 1999) recognising one UK-published "work of imagination for children, in which text and illustration are integrated so that each enhances and balances the other." The 1989 Medal recognised his autobiographical War Boy: A Country Childhood (Pavilion). The highly commended runner up was City of Gold and other stories from the Old Testament (Gollancz), retold by Peter Dickinson, who won the companion Carnegie Medal in Literature for the same book.

As an author he won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (ages 6–8 and overall) for War Game (1993), which he wrote and illustrated. (It was later adapted as a 2001 animated film.) His array of prizes also includes the Red House Children's Book Award; the Bologna Book Prize; and the Francis Williams Illustration Award, twice. As author/illustrator he was also runner up (silver) for the Smarties Prize (ages 6–8) for The Little Reindeer (Andersen, 1996).

Exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe, America and Japan.

WorldCat reports that Foreman's work most widely held in participating libraries, by a wide margin, is The Mozart Question by Michael Morpurgo (2006). It is followed by Leon Garfield's prose retelling of twelve Shakespeare plays, Shakespeare Stories (1985) and Morpurgo's retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004).

Some of his best-received works were published by Gollancz in a series of retellings and classics: Hans Anderson: his classic fairy tales (1976); Popular Folk Tales, newly translated from Brothers Grimm by Brian Alderson (1978) (evidently reissued as The Brothers Grimm: Popular Folk Tales in 1990); City of Gold and other stories from the Old Testament retold by Peter Dickinson (1980); Sleeping Beauty and other favourite fairy tales selected and translated from Perrault and Le Prince de Beaumont by Angela Carter (1982); A Christmas Carol: a ghost story of Christmas (1983); Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield (1985); Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre (1987); The Arabian Nights by Brian Alderson (1992); Shakespeare Stories II by Leon Garfield (1995); A Child's Garden of Verses (1996).