Bill Sanderson

About Bill Sanderson

Bill Sanderson is a freelance illustrator, trained at the West of England College of Art, who works almost entirely in scraperboard, known for his book cover and interior art, including the drawings in Harry Harrison's Eden trilogy, beginning with West of Eden (1984), and the black and white illustrations for J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009).

He began his studies in illustration and graphic design there in 1966. He taught art at a London school while building a freelance practice, and his early editorial commissions came from The Times, Time Out and Radio Times. From the late 1970s he added advertising and publishing work. In scraperboard, a board coated in ink is scratched away to reveal the white areas, and his finished pictures can look like woodcuts. He works mainly in black and white but also produces full colour pieces.

His publishing work includes a run of Penguin covers for Anthony Burgess's novels in the 1980s and book work for Harry Harrison and Felix Dennis. The Author Wars bibliography credits him with interior art for all three Eden novels, West of Eden (1984), Winter in Eden (1986) and Return to Eden (1988), as well as for Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999). For the Tolkien book he drew on Norse wood carvings for inspiration and also drew small typographic devices for the text. He won a V&A award for book cover design in 2005.

For collectors: The 1984 first edition of West of Eden, published by Granada in the UK and Bantam in the US, is listed by Author Wars as carrying his interior art, while Wikipedia gives its cover artist as David Schleinkofer.