Inga Moore

Inga Moore (born 1945) is an Anglo-Australian author and illustrator of books for children.

Life Born in Sussex, England, at the age of eight Moore emigrated with her family to Australia, where she went to school in Adelaide. She has said that at the age of fourteen her favourite book was James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

After leaving school, Moore took a variety of jobs. Raymond Briggs’s book Father Christmas (1973) inspired her to want to illustrate books, and she began to look for work as an illustrator. In the early 1980s, Moore returned to live in England, settling in Hampstead, while still working on picture books. Her Six-Dinner Sid (1990), an illustrated book for children about a cat, took six months to complete but during the recession of the early 1990s her flat was repossessed. This had a happy outcome, as Moore then found an apartment in a large but decaying Palladian house in a Gloucestershire village, with good light in a room she planned to use as a studio. Not far from the River Windrush, the countryside around the house inspired the illustrations for Moore’s edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, which went on to sell more than a million copies.

As of 2010, Moore was still living and working in Gloucestershire. Following her version of The Wind in the Willows, she is reported to be working on a sequel. The Reluctant Dragon, by Kenneth Grahame (2004) Dragons and Other Beasts, by Kenneth Grahame and E. Nesbit (2006) The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Walker Books, 2008, ) The Canterville Ghost, by Oscar Wilde