Brett Helquist

Brett Helquist is an American illustrator best known for the pictures and covers of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. He was born in Ganado, Arizona, in the mid-1960s (Wikipedia gives November 1965, Wikidata 1966) and grew up in Orem, Utah.

He studied engineering before turning to illustration and earned a BFA from Brigham Young University in 1993, the year he moved to New York City. After an internship with the illustrator Robert Neubecker he worked as a graphic designer while drawing for magazines and newspapers, including Cricket and The New York Times. His work on A Series of Unfortunate Events began with The Bad Beginning, published by HarperCollins on 30 September 1999. He has illustrated nearly 50 books, including Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer (2004) and its sequels, Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants (2009) and reissues of Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2011), and he wrote and illustrated Roger, the Jolly Pirate (2004), Bedtime for Bear (2010) and Grumpy Goat (2013). The Mona Lisa Vanishes, which he illustrated, won the 2024 Sibert Medal. In August 2017 he gave early sketches for the Snicket series to BYU's special collections.

For collectors, the American HarperCollins first printings of the Snicket books carry his original artwork. In Britain, Egmont issued a Collectors' Edition and a leather-bound Limited Edition of The Bad Beginning on 1 October 2003 with new colour art by Helquist; the Limited Edition, in a slipcase with a bookplate signed by Daniel Handler, was reportedly limited to about 1,000 copies.