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 Baby 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 picture book texts for other illustrators, and also illustrates her own middle grade fiction - most recently, ''The Taming of the Cat' published by Faber and Faber in the UK. WorldCat reports that Pumpkin Soup is her work most widely held in participating libraries.

Personal life

Cooper was married to Ted Dewan, a fellow children's book author and illustrator and they have one daughter. They are now divorced.

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