Jackie Morris and Stephen Raw for Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb (Harper Voyager)
About Jackie Morris:
“I was born in Birmingham and lived there until at the age of four my parents moved away to Evesham.
After school I went to college, first in Hereford, then to Exeter where they told me that I would never make it as an illustrator and from there I escaped to Bath Academy, set in a beautiful stately home in Corsham. After college I moved briefly to London, just off Balham High Road. I thought you had to live in London because that is where most of the publishing houses are. (It didn’t take me long to realize that I was not born to live in a city) It was here that my real education began as I took my portfolio around magazine publishers and book publishers. I worked in magazines and books for seven years, for The New Statesman, New Socialist, Independent, Guardian and Radio Times. I designed cards and calendars for Greenpeace and Amnesty International and fell into children’s books by accident.
I moved to Wales just before starting my first children’s book, Jo’s Storm, by Caroline Pitcher, and have lived in the same place ever since, a small cottage held together by spider’s webs. Cats come and go. At the moment I share the house with Tom and Hannah, my son and daughter, Floss and Bella, two odd dogs, and Maurice, Pixie, Elmo, Martha and Max, cats of various colour but mostly ginger.
About Stephen Raw:
Stephen Raw, born in 1952 in London, has lived in Manchester for the last 40-plus years. He has been a textual artist and designer since his return to Britain after two years teaching at the National Arts School in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
Stephen’s work is varied, from paintings in exhibitions, to cover designs and his commercial lettering for a variety of clients, including leading publishers, architects and design groups throughout Europe.
“Fundamental to all my artwork,” Stephen says, “is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through signs we simply call letters: never-failing sources of inspiration. Letters are images in themselves and, for me, that’s more than enough to be getting on with.”
He has exhibited widely: Germany, Ireland the United States and Italy. One of his paintings, words by Nelson Mandela, is in the renowned collection of the StiftungArchiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. All his Carcanet Press book jacket and cover artwork, part of the Carcanet archive, is now kept by the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester.