Sarah Webb & Lauren O’Neill
Sarah Webb is a writer for children and adults. A Sailor Went to Sea, Sea, Sea: Favourite Rhymes from an Irish Childhood (with Steve McCarthy) won the Irish Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year (Junior) in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Awards 2018. Sarah won the Children’s Books Ireland Award for Outstanding Contribution to Children’s Books in 2015. Sarah also runs Story Crew: Write, Draw, Create, which provides writing clubs and creative workshops for children and the young at heart. She is the Children’s Literary Advisor to Listowel Writers’ Week. Sarah has a great love of history and over the years has been inspired by many remarkable women, from her primary school English teacher Miss Cahill, to her history of art lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, Professor Anne Crookshank.
Lauren O’Neill is a curly-haired, Wexford-born illustrator and graduate of NCAD who now lives and works in Dublin City. She lives with her husband, Dónal, and spends most of her time in or near her home studio, drawing, eating biscuits or going on nature walks with their dog, Smudge. She often does drawing workshops for children, usually learning more from them than they do from her.Lauren’s work can be found on the covers and insides of several books for children, and she is the proud winner of the Children’s Books Ireland Honour Award for Illustration 2016 for Gulliver, Jonathan Swifts classic tale retold by Mary Webb, also published by The O’Brien Press.