Kids book wise, It’s been a busy time of late and I’ve just finished artwork for my next book ‘Rhinocorn Rules!’ about a Rhinoceros who feels different to other Rhinos. It’s published by Egmont in Feb 2020! I’ve got 3 more books lined up too so watch this space!
Superbat has been chosen by Booktrust as one of their BOOKBUZZ books. You can find out more about it here.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing I designed this Warhol inspired t shirt.
I’ve just done a range of kids clothes for London Transport Museum! I love busses and I love animals! You can buy em here!
Amazingly SPYDER has been shortlisted for the LOLLIES! which is the award for the funniest books of the year! As you can imagine i’m well chuffed. Hopefully it will prove to my kids that my jokes ARE funny and I’m not just that sad idiot who works out of the back of the kitchen! You can vote for SPYDER here
Just designed / illustrated this book about D-Day. It’s out now! Click here to get hold of it!
It’s been a few months since my last post because it’s been MEGA busy. But some nice news is that Rocketmole has launched at last! My mum likes it and she’s 87 so that is a good sign. Although she always say she likes everything I do (i think she’s just saying it) so it’s probably better to go into a book shop and make your own mind up. It’s not War and Peace so you can get through it in about 5 minutes.
Only a couple of months until my new kids book Rocketmole! is launched! You can pre-order it here! https://www.waterstones.com/book/rocketmole/matt-carr/matt-carr/9781407187860
The Biographic series that I do has now got 20 titles and is translated into loads of languages. The latest two are Tesla and Einstein which were quite tricky as i have less understanding of science than my cat does.
This job was one of the most laborious I’ve ever done. Luckily I could listen to about a million hours of radio including about 5 hours of the wonderful June Whitfield playing Miss Marple!
Had a lovely day at the Oxfordshire Book Awards where SUPERBAT was highly commended in the picture book category. They even made a SUPERBAT cake!
In 2007 I designed the Milkshake! logo for Channel 5. (They only changed it this year.) So it was great when they said they were going to read SUPERBAT across their Social Media channels on Halloween. You can still watch it here!
It’s been a while but i’ve been very busy plus having an extension done on our tiny house (13ft wide!) to make it slightly less tiny (same width bit longer) so i’ve been living and working in building site with no water ! just me and the cats. the rest of the family have sensibly moved out. I think the cats want to move out as well but i’m paying them to stay. It’s about 3 quarters finished and everyone has disappeared, which is great. Anyway as a way off getting out of whats left of my house i went to do festivals at Cheltenham (where i’m the kids festival illustrator this year) and then Henley. I had a blast! I decided to turn up the bonkers and introduce a sing a long theme tune and various wigs to my event thing. I also came on to a hollywood style trailer theme and ran about and did roly polys on the stage. I think i over did it, anyway I think it went ok - i think they thought i was an idiot. i had over 500 kids in on the friday schools event and the family event was sold out to. I may need to see a chiropractor as i landed heavily on my radio mic during one of my action stunt rolls! After Cheltenham i had to rush in the pouring rain to Henley for their festival. i got there only to discover i’d been sitting in a falafel which had fallen out of my sandwich! That’s show biz.
Last weekend I went back to my old manor to the Greenwich Book Festival(well I hail from Woolwich, the rough side of town). I was a bit nervous because somehow I was billed as doing both Superbat and Spyder in one session! But it went really well and i had a great time! I even got on the official poster! Ok i was last and I think i only got on the because I've got a short name but hey!
As usual my blog is about two weeks out of date but last week i went to the high brow literature festival at Hay on Wye. I was the lowest brow thing there but it was really good fun!
On Wednesday i went up to Cambridge to the Read It First Award Ceremony, wearing the same outfit i always wear! Met some lovely people and loads of funny kids and OD'd on orange squash. I didn't win but it was great to be on the list as its chosen by actual kids!
It's been a busy time of late on the book front with trips to Cardiff Kids lit Fest and Oxford Bookfeast which were both great fun. Also been put on the shortlist for the Indie Bookshop Book Award which is a great honour! Have zero chance of winning obviously with the likes of Rob Biddulph, Judith Kerr and Julia Donaldson on there, but it's nice to be in the same company as them!
Very fiddly illustrations of cameras through the ages for the RMG Greenwich Seaside photography exhibition. Good job i'm a wobbly line drawing specialist! Here is a link to the exhibition
Just designed this book to celebrate the centenary of the RAF. it includes quite a few plane illustrations and it was a bit of a behemoth!
I am probably one of the world's slowest bloggers, usually taking two weeks to post news and I've done it again with this post about my lovely evening at the Waterstones Childrens Book Prize. It was a great night which went by in a flash. I didn't win anything except Britain's most popular bat based children's picture book (by default!). It was very exciting though and there was loads of people there (Waterstones Piccadilly). To cap it all off I met my comedy hero Michael Palin afterwards and made a right prat of myself!
