ABOUT TED

Ted Dewan went full time into illustration and story in 1988 when he moved over and up to North London from the Massachusetts homeland. He's still there, only now down in South London.

Before that, he was born in Boston and grew up in Lexington with his brother, Brian Dewan (far left in photo), and across the street from Scott McCloud (third in photo, next to dark-haired 5-year-old Ted). He went to university to study engineering, pipe organ, electronic music, and art with his one* of his two all-time favourite mentors, author/illustrator David Macaulay). Just as the engineering studies got close to finishing him off, he graduated from Brown University in 1983 and taught high-school physics for five years at Milton Academy on the edge of Boston.

Throughout the entire 1990's, his illustrations were in Britain's newspapers and magazines, including Times Educational Supplement, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Correspondent, The European, and The Sunday Times, mainly illustrating the kinds of articles nobody else wanted to, which turned out to be fun and just as well paid as the more prestigious editorial work.

Since winning the 1992 Mother Goose Award for his first illustrated non-fiction book with Steve Parker, Inside the Whale and Other Animals, he has created both fiction and non-fiction picture books, including the Crispin the Pig series, and the groundbreaking series of Bing books for very young children and parents/carers. He worked on the team at Acamar Films that developed, designed, and wrote scripts for the Emmy Award-winning television adaptation.

He returned to London in 2018 after 17 extraordinary years living in Oxford with his former wife, Helen Cooper, raising their daughter, Pandora.

His work away from screen and paper includes the design and building of Oxford's first artist's Christmas Tree, Cyclemas Tree, creating exhibitions and installations for The Story Museum in Oxford (most significantly, The Fabulous Account of Rochester's Extraordinary Storyloom) and spearheading Britain's only DIY Street redesign built by its residents. He is a campaigner for more imaginative redesigns and repurposing of roads as the vaguely defined "road justice consultancy" Roadwitch.

Ted is a former chair of the Children's Writers and Illustrator's Group of the Society of Authors. He is currently developing a new animated television series for children loosely based on Brixton, where he lives.

Ted may be the first child in history to play an experimental video game in the late 1960s. It was at Hanscom Field's Air Force Research Laboratory outside Boston where his dad was a scientist. The game was on a small black-and-white monitor being run off tape -reel computers like an extremely slow and simple Space Invaders. In spite of that, he hardly played anything later than "Pong" once that got boring.

Hanscom Field Air Force Research Laboratory's computers looked like this, possibly with technicians actually wearing white lab coats, with significantly more mess than in this staged business photo

Ted is also known as the former steward of Philip Pullman's writing shed (where he wrote His Dark Materials trilogy) and has passed it on to another creative as per the covenant of the shed. He also offered his head for shrinking and display at the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology in his will. The museum turned down the offer.

He also wrote all this about himself in the

3rd-person (most people do). That may appear cring and self-important, but writing it in 1st-person reads even more cringe and self-important. Try it for yourself and you'll see.

Ted

* the other all-time favourite mentor is Lesya Parekh from Parker School days--we met in London 2018 for the first time since I was eleven years old.

bio

ABOUT TED

Artist & Maker

Screenwriter

Author/Illustrator

Exec Producer

Music-maker

Mischievier

Handyman

Been There, Done That (+ links)

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Awards, Laurels, & Crowns

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Exhibitionism

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Talking in Front of People

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