Oliver Jeffers (born 1977) Oliver Jeffers’ award-winning picture books comprise just one element of his wide-ranging artistic oeuvre. He also produces figurative paintings, prints, illustrations and installations that are celebrated and exhibited worldwide.
Oliver Jeffers was born in Port Hedland, Western Australia, and moved to Belfast in 1979. He learnt to draw by copying the Asterix comic book strip, and he credits his early love for painting to John Singer Sargent portraits. He began to seriously consider painting as a career in 1995, when he became runner-up in the Irish News amateur art competition. From that date, he contributed to exhibitions in Belfast, and soon began to design book jackets for local publishing houses.
His father was a teacher and encouraged his two sons to attend arts schools. Oliver did a foundation year at Ulster College of Art & Design under the tutelage of Dennis McBride, and went on to study Illustration and Visual Communication at the University of Ulster, graduating with a first class degree in 2001.
During the year 1999-2000, Jeffers took a break from university and travelled to Australia and the USA. While based in Sydney, he became a freelance painter and illustrator, working for various magazines, and illustrating for the Lavazza Coffee Company. The results of this sojourn appeared in two sell-out exhibitions in Sydney in 2000: ‘Opposites’ (at the Manley Gallery, as part of the Olympics) and ‘A World with Coffee’ (at the Rocks Festival, sponsored by Lavazza).
Oliver held a number of further exhibitions on his return to Belfast, including two solo shows, ‘The Boys at the Bar’ (The John Hewitt, 2000) and ‘The Session’ (Lyric Theatre, 2003). As co-founder of the art collective, OAR, he mounted ‘9 days in Belfast’ (Cotton Court, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, 2003), ‘Book’ (Lagan Weir Tunnel, 2004; Cities Art and Recovery Festival, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, 2005), and ‘Building’ (The Switch Room, Belfast Festival at Queens, 2005; Project 4, Smithsonian Folk-Life Fest, Washington DC, 2007). He held two further solo shows in Belfast in 2006, and continued to exhibit work in London, Ireland, Australia and the USA.
Developing a passion for the relationship between words and images, Oliver launched the first of his children’s picture books, How to Catch a Star, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, in 2001. He was met with great success and more titles followed. Oliver was the official illustrator for World Book Day in 2007. He worked with Studio AKA on an animated short film adaptation of his second picture book, Lost and Found, which was broadcast on Christmas Eve in 2008. It received over 40 awards, including the BAFTA for Best Animation in 2009. His sixth book The Heart and the Bottle won both the British Book Design and Production Award and the V&A Book Illustration Award in 2010 and 2011. From 2010 he began to illustrate books by other authors while continuing to release his own publications.
Oliver married in 2010, and moved into his new studio in Brooklyn, New York in February 2011. In May 2012, he created a print and TV advert campaign for Ferrero Kinder Chocolate. He undertook book tours while continuing to work across other practices. In 2014 he began ‘The Dipped Painting Project’, a series of portraits that he would finish and then partially dip into vats of enamel paint. These were completed as performances and were a commentary on memory and loss, both themes that would go on to inform his later books.
In 2015 his son was born, inspiring his book Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth. It debuted at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List in 2017 and in the same year won Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year award in the Young Adult and Children's Books category. It was later adapted into an Emmy award winning animated short film (2020). In 2020 Oliver moved back to Northern Ireland, where he splits his time between his studio in Brooklyn. He published What We’ll Build: Plans for our Future Together inspired by and following the birth of his second child, a daughter.
In 2022 he was appointed MBE for services to the arts. He designed and released limited edition prints of a film poster for 'The Whale', the Oscar award-winning film, in collaboration with its director Darren Aronofsky.
In 2023 Begin Again was published to critical acclaim. In the same year The Times reported that his books have sold over 14 million copies worldwide. His prolific and varied bodies of recent work are concerned with themes such as the environment and social understanding, and his children’s books are promoted as works for all ages.
In October 2024 Harper Collins launched Oliver’s latest book, Where to Hide a Star. This reunites characters from early books How to Catch a Star (2004) and Lost and Found (2005). This year marks 20 years since his debut children’s book.
Oliver Jeffers lives with his wife Suzanne and their two children Harland and Mari in Holywood, County Down.
