Charlie Mackesy (born December - February 1962) is a British artist and the author of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. The book has sold over 1.4 million copies and spent 55 weeks on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List top ten. His book was selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019 and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards in 2020. Mackesy was contacted by an editor who had seen his drawings on Instagram and subsequently published with her on Ebury. Charlie Mackesy was born during a very cold snowy winter in Northumberland. He never went to art school but spent three months in America with a portrait painter where he learned about anatomy and how to deal with bed bugs. He began as a cartoonist for The Spectator and a book illustrator for Oxford University Press before being taken on by galleries. Charlie’s work features in books, private collections, and public spaces, including Highgate Cemetery in London, in hospitals, prisons, churches, and university colleges around the UK, and in women’s safe houses around the world. Less