Jez Alborough
Jez Alborough was born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1959. As a child he had two great loves – drawing and football. He recalls lying on his stomach, feet in the air, recreating great football games, cowboys, faces from magazines and characters from his comic with his pens. Once he started at school he discovered the “Aladdin’s cave” of the teacher’s stockroom and claims that his first illustrated books were “ruled on the left (for his stories) and blank pages on the right (for his drawings)”. It was on a school trip to Wales, when he described a range of hills as being like a sleeping dinosaur slumped across the land, that he discovered a joy for words.
Jez went on to attend art school in Norwich where he spent three years studying his heroes – people like H.M. Bateman, Edward Ardizzone. He carried a sketchbook throughout these years in which he recorded scenes from his teenage life – studios, pubs, flats. The interplay between words and images was very important to him and he always annotated these drawings with a phrase, punch line or just a title. In his last year at college and illustrated poem, full of word play, was printed and made up into his first ever printed book. After art school he spent some time travelling around magazine offices and publishers, opening his portfolio to art editors like ‘some enormous black butterfly’. His first editorial job was for The Listener, which eventually led to a commission to illustrate a book of wordplay jokes called Dotty Definitions. At this point it hadn’t occurred to Jez that children’s picture books were the obvious outlet for exercising his talent for drawing and love of words. An editor at A.C. Blacks saw some sketches of a polar bear character that he had created – having decided that the bears furry paws looked like mittens, he had drawn them on a piece of string emerging from sleeves, like children often wear them. This logically led to the idea that a polar bear’s coat could be removed like a normal coat and so he had drawn him taking the coat off. The publisher asked Jez if he could write a story about this bear, and it turned out he could – he came up with the first two lines in the bath:
“To keep warm in the polar air – a polar bear wears polar wear.”
Soon he had created “the first, and almost certainly the last, book about a polar bear doing a strip tease” and in 1984 his first picture book Bare Bearwas published.