Kady MacDonald Denton


Kady MacDonald Denton is a Canadian creator of children's books, primarily an illustrator of picture books. She observed in 2011 that "I'm in that quickly-shrinking group of illustrators who doesn’t use a computer at any stage in the illustration process."

Life

Denton was born in Winnipeg and raised in Toronto, Ontario. She studied at the University of Toronto, the Banff School of Fine Arts, and the Chelsea School of Art. She and her husband live in Peterborough, Ontario.

Career

Early in the 1990s Denton illustrated three Kingfisher collections of retellings by Ann Pilling, which have been reissued. For another Kingfisher collection several years later, A Child's Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, she won the 1998 Governor General's Award for English language children's illustration, and also the 1999 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator's Award and Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Canadian Picture Book Awards. Previously, she had won the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon award for 'Til All the Stars Have Fallen: Canadian Poems for Children, edited by David Booth. She won the Mrazik-Cleaver award again in 2006 for Snow, written by Joan Clark.
The Children's Literature Association named Would They Love a Lion?, which Denton both wrote and illustrated, as an Honor Winner of the 2015 Phoenix Picture Book Award, which annually recognises a picture book with lasting value that did not win a major award 20 years earlier. "Books are considered not only for the quality of their illustrations, but for the way pictures and text work together."

Selected works

As illustrator