Mark Burgess Biography - Sidelights

British-based graphic artist, author, and illustrator Mark Burgess began his career in the early 1980s, creating artwork for several volumes in Martin Waddell's popular series about a young protagonist named Harriet. While he has continued to work as an illustrator, producing a newly illustrated edition of Hardie Gramatky's classic childhood favorite, Little Toot and designing pop-up adaptations of A. A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" books, Burgess has also collaborating with author Meredith Hooper and fellow illustrator Allen Curless on Dog's Night, a humorous story that finds the dogs depicted on paintings in London's National Gallery freed from their canvases and running through the museum in riotous fashion, only to return, at night's end, to the wrong paintings. In School Library Journal Patricia Mahoney Brown praised the book's illustrations as "comical and whimsical as the tale itself," while Ken Marantz wrote in School Arts that the "colored drawings set the stage" for Hooper's quirky tale. In addition to illustration, Burgess has also expanded into the writer's realm with The Cat's Pajamas, which uses a rhyme wheel to relate the adventures of a seagoing feline; the lift-the-flap counting book One Little Teddy Bear; and the pirate adventure Mutiny at Crossbow Bay. Praising Burgess's Teddy Time, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the book "encourages telling time" through a simple, repetitive rhyming text. His other self-illustrated books include the four-part "Hannah's Hotel" series, about a holiday establishment run by Hannah Hedgehog, Mollie Mouse, Sam Squirrel, and hardworking handyman Rodney Rabbit.