Helen Cooper (illustrator)
Helen Sonia Cooper (born 1963 in London) is a British illustrator and an author of children's literature. She grew up in Cumbria, where she practiced literature and piano playing. She currently lives in Oxford. Cooper has twice been awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. She won for "The Boy Who Wouldn't Go To Bed" in 1996, which she wrote and illustrated. In 1998 she won for "Pumpkin Soup", which she also wrote and  illustrated. They were consecutive projects for her. Beside winning the two Greenaway Medals (no one has won three), Cooper made the shortlist for "The Bear Under the Stairs" (Doubleday, 1993) and "Tatty Ratty" (Doubleday, 2001). As well as her solo picture books, Cooper writes and illustrates her own Middle Grade fiction. Most recently "The Hippo at the end of the Hall' published by David Fickling Books in the UK. WorldCat reports that "Pumpkin Soup" is her work most widely held in participating libraries. Works. Cooper is both the writer and the illustrator of many published picture books and a set  of four "mini-books" about toy animals (1994), later packaged in English, Spanish, and Catalan languages as "Toy Tales" (1999). She has illustrated a few books by other writers and written one book with another illustrator, as noted. References