SATA

PERSONAL

Born in Hilo, HI.

Arts University College at Bournemouth, Poole, England.

ADDRESS

• Home - London, England, United Kingdom.

CAREER

Illustrator and author.

Reading, watching films.

WRITINGS

• SELF-ILLUSTRATED
• Wild, Flying Eye Books (London, England), 2013
• The Little Gardener, Flying Eye Books (London, England), 2015
• The Snail, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2022
• ILLUSTRATOR
• Roddy Doyle, Brilliant, Amulet Books (New York, NY), 2015
• Sean Taylor, A Brave Bear, Candlewick Press (Somerville, MA), 2016
• Carter Higgins, Everything You Need for a Treehouse, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2018
• (Written by Atinuke) Beti and the Little Round House, Candlewick (Somerville, MA), 2024
• (Written by Gideon Sterer) If You Make a Call on a Banan Phone, Clarion Books (New York, NY), 2025
• “CHARLIE & MOUSE” PICTURE BOOK SERIES
• Laurel Snyder, Charlie & Mouse, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2017
• Laurel Snyder, Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2017
• Laurel Snyder, Charlie & Mouse Even Better, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2019
• Laurel Snyder, Charlie & Mouse Outdoors, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2020
• (Written by Laurel Snyder) Charlie & Mouse Lost and Found, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2021
• Laurel Snyder, Charlie & Mouse are Magic, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2022

Also, author of Nana Shaped Like a Banana.

SIDELIGHTS

Originally from Hilo, Hawaii, Emily Hughes moved to England when she was seventeen years old. Educated at Arts University College at Bournemouth, she works as an illustrator for children’s books. She has written and released self-illustrated books and has illustrated the books of other authors, including Sean Taylor, Carter Higgins, Roddy Doyle, and Laurel Snyder.

Hughes’s first self-illustrated book is Wild, released in 2013. It features a girl learning from the animals she lives with in the woods. Bears, birds, and other creatures teach her how to perform regular actions, like eating and speaking. A human couple is shocked to find the girl living alone in the woods. They take her home to live with them. The little girl is unhappy in her new environment and ultimately runs back to the woods, where she feels she belongs. Mary Medicott, a contributor to School Librarian, described Wild as “a challenging picture-book—simple on the surface, unsettling underneath.”

In 2015 Hughes published The Little Gardener, another self-illustrated book. It tells the story of a tiny man who is inspired by a beautiful flower to tend to its garden. A normal-sized girl takes over the gardening when the tiny man falls asleep. The man wakes and, with the girl, enjoys the blooms in the garden they have made. In an interview with a contributor to the Design of the Picture Book website, Hughes explained how the book came to be. She stated: “Lots of things were swimming around in my head when The Little Gardener was being made. I was back home rereading a book I love, The Growth of the Soil, about a simple, self-sufficient man dealing with societal pressures that seem unnecessary. He was the symbol of The Little Gardener, he’s not the personality powerhouse Wild is, he is really just a symbol for the everyman, the underdog, you, me, (my brother thinks the third world) our place as a human. It’s not about him, it’s about his vision, his hopes.”

A reviewer in Publishers Weekly asserted: “Hughes’s rich, rhythmic storytelling voice and dark tapestry spreads carry perennial magic.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “a lovely visual tribute to the persistent hard work behind every flourishing garden.” “A gentle fairy tale, the story encourages tenacity,” noted Gay Lynn Van Vleck in School Library Journal.

Hughes features a famous Japanese sculptor in the picture-book biography The Snail. Isamu Noguchi was born to a Japanese father and an American mother and struggled to feel completely at home in Japan or the United States. The book showcases a light sculpture Noguchi created and uses it to further examine how his style developed. Despite his identity issues, Noguchi’s art brought him comfort. Ultimately, his art, like his identity, defied categorization. A critic in Kirkus Reviews considered The Snail “an ambitious attempt to chronicle the life of a complex artist.” A writer in Publishers Weekly described the picture book as “visually elegant.” The same critic noted that the illustrations “give this picture book a sense of visual calm.”

Hughes illustrated Brilliant, a book by Doyle, which finds children chasing the Black Dog of Depression out of Dublin. Taylor tapped Hughes to illustrate his 2016 book, A Brave Bear. Hughes is the illustrator for both Charlie & Mouse and its sequel, Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy, written by Laurel Snyder. The former tells of two siblings’ daily adventures. In Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy, their grandpa visits them. Hughes is the illustrator of 2018’s Everything You Need for a Treehouse, written by Carter Higgins.

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After illustrating four more books in the “Charlie & Mouse” series, Hughes worked with the children’s book author Atinuke on her early reader book Beti and the Little Round House. In the story, Beti is a young girl who loves living deep in the forest in her round house with her parents and baby Jac. On Beti’s birthday, she receives a goat named Naughty as a pet, but the goat’s first act is to destroy the birthday cake. The book features a series of connected stories about Beti, Naughty, and their community, with the stories also focusing on nature and how that changes through the seasons. Hughes uses muted pastels to help bring Atinuke’s stories to life. A writer in Publishers Weekly enjoyed the stories and how they “introduce the girl’s vibrantly depicted community.” The result is that even mundane actions turn into “epic adventures.” The reviewer praised Hughes’s illustrations for how they “mirror the cheerful warmth of the stories.”

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BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, March 15, 2016, Briana Shemroske, review of A Brave Bear, p. 64.

• Horn Book, July-August, 2017, Elisa Gall, review of Charlie & Mouse, p. 142.

• Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2015, review of The Little Gardener; July 1, 2015, review of Brilliant; February 15, 2016, review of A Brave Bear; February 15, 2017, review of Charlie & Mouse; August 1, 2017, review of Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy; December 1, 2022, review of The Snail.

• Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2015, review of The Little Gardener, p. 81; June 8, 2015, review of Brilliant, p. 59; December 2, 2015, review of The Little Gardener, p. 24; January 18, 2016, review of A Brave Bear, p. 77; December 2, 2016, review of A Brave Bear, p. 31; February 13, 2017, review of Charlie & Mouse, p. 76; October 24, 2022, review of The Snail, p. 82; July 29, 2024, review of Beti and the Little Round House, p. 64.

• School Librarian, winter, 2013, Mary Medicott, review of Wild, p. 215; autumn, 2016, Wendy Worley, review of A Brave Bear, p. 160.

• School Library Journal, June, 2015, Gay Lynn Van Vleck, review of The Little Gardener, p. 84; July, 2015, Wayne R. Cherry, Jr., review of Brilliant, p. 75; February, 2016, Marianne Saccardi, review of A Brave Bear, p. 73; January, 2017, Casey O’Leary, review of Charlie & Mouse, p. 81; October, 2017, Luann Toth, review of Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy, p. 88; July, 2022, Kerra Mazzariello, review of Charlie & Mouse Are Magic, p. 53.

ONLINE

• Cartoon Brew, http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ (December 5, 2014), Chris McDonnell, profile of author and examples of her work.

• Daily Star, https://www.thedailystar.net/ (July 12, 2019), Sadi Mohammad Shahnewaz, author interview.

• Design of the Picture Book, http://www.designofthepicturebook.com/ (August 25, 2017), author interview; (August 26, 2017), author interview.

• Nobrow Website, http://nobrow.net/ (March 2, 2018), author interview.

• Picturebook Makers, http://blog.picturebookmakers.com/ (March 2, 2018), author profile.*