Kady MacDonald Denton - Click to see all titles by this author.

“It helps me to think of a picture book as a little operetta in frozen form – two languages together telling one story – because both pictures and words deliver the story.”

Award-winning Canadian author and illustrator Kady MacDonald Denton was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Toronto, Ontario. Kady is a graduate of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto and in later years enjoyed several courses and studio sessions at the Chelsea School of Art and the Banff School of Fine Arts. She taught art classes at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba. For many years she delighted in volunteering in schools as a teacher and as an artist. The enthusiasm of the children helped her own artwork.

Kady works in an attic studio at the top of a tall yellow brick house. With a coffee or cuppa (tea) in hand, along with classical, jazz, or a physics lecture playing, she begins her process, considering composition, pacing, and page breaks, and trying various abstract patterns while sketching characters and settings. Kady doesn’t use a computer: “I use pen and ink with water colors on hot-pressed watercolor paper. As the painting develops, I bring in gouache, oil sticks, perhaps a bit of chalk.”

Kady’s books are read by children around the world, have won awards, and are translated into many languages. She and her husband live in Peterborough, Ontario. They have grown children who visit them often.