Michael Foreman

About Michael Foreman

Michael Foreman (born 21 March 1938) is an English author and illustrator, born in Pakefield, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, known for long collaborations with Terry Jones and Michael Morpurgo.

Foreman studied at the Lowestoft School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he won a travel scholarship to the United States. His early work included newspaper drawings and suspect sketches for the police, and travel drawing took him around the world. His early books as author and illustrator include The Perfect Present (1967), Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish (1972) and War and Peas (1974).

He illustrated Terry Jones's Fairy Tales (1981) and The Saga of Erik the Viking (1983), a revised edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1985) and Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom, first published in the late 1990s. His memoir of a wartime Suffolk childhood, War Boy (1989), won the Kate Greenaway Medal, and he had earlier shared the 1982 Greenaway Medal for Helen Piers's Long Neck and Thunder Foot and for Angela Carter's selection Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales. He also won the Kurt Maschler Award (1982) and the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Gold Award (1993), was twice the UK nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (1988 and 2010) and was appointed OBE in 2022 for services to literature. Later Morpurgo titles include Little Manfred (2011) and A Medal for Leroy (2012).

For collectors

First editions of War Boy (1989) and of the Greenaway-winning books of 1982 are the key Foreman titles, along with early printings of his Terry Jones and Morpurgo collaborations.