Dave McKean has illustrated and designed over eighty award winning and ground breaking books and graphic novels including The Magic of Reality (Richard Dawkins), The Homecoming (Ray Bradbury), The Fat Duck Cookbook and Historic Heston (Heston Blumenthal), What's Welsh for Zen (John Cale), The Savage, Slog’s Dad and Mouse Bird Snake Wolf (David Almond), Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison), Night Shift (Stephen King), Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino), Neuromancer (William Gibson), Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers), Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake), Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise, Coraline, The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman), and Tyger, (SF Said) winner in 2023 of the UK National Award for Children’s Book of the Year.
He has written and illustrated Cages (Harvey, Pantera, Ignatz and Alph Art awards), two Pictures That Tick volumes of short stories (V+A Book of the Year), an erotic novel Celluloid, Raptor (German Peng! Prize), and Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, a commission by the 14-18 Now Foundation and the Imperial War Museum. The multimedia live performance of Black Dog was featured at Tate Britain, the Somme Memorial in Amiens, and many other festivals in Europe, Canada, and India. He recently won the inaugural Munchausen and Sergio awards for excellence in imaginative fiction and comics, and was chosen by Apple as one of their 30 key creatives in 2014 for their 30th anniversary. His next graphic novel is a retelling of Gilgamesh with the author Robert Macfarlane and actor/musician Johnny Flynn.
Dave has directed five short films and three feature films, MirrorMask, Luna (Raindance Best British Feature and BIFA awards) and The Gospel of Us with Michael Sheen (two Bafta Cymru awards). He is currently editing his fourth feature Wolf’s Child, adapted from his own play, created with Wildworks Theatre Company and performed for the Norwich Theatre Festival and at the Trelowarren Estate in Cornwall.
He is Director of Story at the 3-Michelin star Fat Duck in Bray, and has created murals and packaging for Heston Blumenthal’s restaurants in London and Australia. His work is in private and public collections around the world, and he continues to insist that narrative has a crucial place in art. A 600 page retrospective Thalamus: The Art of Dave McKean was published in Nov.’23.
In 2022 he took a deep dive into AI generated imagery, and created the book Prompt: Conversations with Artificial Intelligence as an essay, examination and warning about the implications of this new, almost evolutionary, shift in our culture. He continues to draw and paint and make real things in Kent, England.
