“One of the most striking features of a Gillian McClure picture book is the carefully organised correlation between text and illustration. It’s a symbiotic relationship reflecting Gillian’s conception of the picture book as an entity — words and pictures in a narrative and visual harmony... Her discriminating feel for language — inherited perhaps from her father, the poet Paul Coltman, her collaborator on a number of books, including Tinker Jim and Tog the Ribber, both short-listed for the Smarties Award — matches her sensitivity for line and colour.”
Carousel 2008 Issue 40

Gillian McClure’s career as an author/illustrator started in when a School’s Inspector spotted a book she had made for her class of infants and sent it off to Andre Deutsch who published it in 1974. Since then she has had many books published and has accumulated a great many illustrations; some she shows in schools along with her sketches and roughs and some she has framed up for exhibitions.

Gillian has served on the CWIG committee, the Public Lending Right Advisory Committee, was a 2006-7 New Writing Partnership Escalator judge/mentor, and a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Kent University 2005-8 and Essex University 2011-12. She now gives training sessions for student teachers in Faculties of Education.

From 2010 - 2016 she ran her own publishing company, Plaister Press, to celebrate the art of the picture book and did a blog on writing and illustrating. Now her books are published by Troika .

View Gillian’s complete bibliography.