Gillian is a multi award-winning artist and writer of Scottish and Irish heritage, who grew up in Dundee and now makes her home in County Durham, where she wanders the countryside with two daughters and a boisterous dog. A daydreamer at heart, she is known for the light in her work and loves expansive skies, cold North Sea air, big unanswerable questions and all things storytelling.

She is the creator of several picture books and is a ‘USA Today’ bestseller, with clients that include Walker Books, Candlewick Press, HarperCollins, Penguin Randomhouse, Penguin Studio, Farrar Strauss Giroux, Faber and Smithsonian. She has also collaborated with BBC, Channel 4, Vogue, Molliemakes, Theatre Hullabaloo, The Civic in Dublin and The Auckland Project, among others.

Gillian is also currently the executive director of ‘Hidden Story’, a creative arts social enterprise using storytelling as a vehicle for community development and place-making. There she devised ‘Bobble Hat Books’, a family literacy programme, and ‘Talking Tapestries’, a story-gathering project using textiles and oral history recording, supported by Historic England. She has opened three storytelling pop-up shops in Scotland and England, run a poetry festival and published three books co-created by primary school children.

She was previously co-founder of the social enterprise, Tea People and is a trustee of Unltd, the foundation for Social Entrepreneurs and Self Made Studios, offering people an accessible route into fashion and textiles.

An avid and curious wanderer and learner, she has worked extensively in China and India, taken trains from Beijing all the way to France and has visited almost all of the states in the USA as a researcher. Her previous jobs include photographer, auxiliary nurse, charity founder, oboist, funeral organist and parrot-minder- perhaps a bit random but all very excellent inspiration for storytelling, if nothing else!