MACKESY
Charlie

• 1. Career

Charlie Mackesy is a British artist, illustrator and the author of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Career

Mackesy began his career as a cartoonist for The Spectator, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. He also worked with Richard Curtis on the set of Love Actually to create a set of drawings to be auctioned for Comic Relief and has continued to work with the charity that he loves. He was selected to work on Nelson Mandela's Unity Series project, a lithograph project working together with Mandela on the drawings he made.

His bronzes can be found in public spaces in London, including Highgate Cemetery and the Brompton Road. His paintings have been exhibited widely, most frequently with galleries in London and New York.

His work has featured in books, private collections, galleries, magazine covers, street lamp posts, school classrooms, cafés, women's safe houses, churches, prisons, hospital wards and countless other public spaces around the world. Mackesy was contacted by an editor who had seen his drawings on Instagram and subsequently published with her on Ebury Press. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, first published in October 2019, and has spent over 100 weeks on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List top ten and is the longest Sunday Times Hardback Number One of all time. His book was selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019 and the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year 2019 (the first ever book to be awarded both in the same year) and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards in 2020.

Mackesy was amongst the winners of the 2020 Nielsen Bestseller Awards, with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse achieving Platinum status. All titles that achieve Platinum status are inducted into the "21st century Hall of Fame", which now includes 149 titles. In 2020, eight books passed the Platinum Award million copy sales threshold. Mackesy was awarded Maddox Gallery Artist of the Year at the GQ Men of the Year Awards in 2020 and Illustrator of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021. Mackesy co-directed and co-wrote the animated short film based on the book. In March 2023 Mackesy won, with Matthew Freud, the Oscar for Animated Short Film for The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.