Barbara Reid
Canadian illustrator and writer
Barbara Reid (born November 16, 1957) is a Canadian illustrator and author of children's books. She has been called "one of Canada's major literary figures". In 2012, she received the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, an honour presented annually to a writer or illustrator whose body of work has been "inspirational to Canadian youth".
Biography
Reid was born in Toronto, Ontario, on November 16, 1957, and studied at the Ontario College of Art.
After graduation, she began her career creating illustrations for textbooks, after which she began illustrating children's books. She is known for her unique, sculpted-clay imagery, which was established with her illustrations for Elizabeth Clark's The New Baby Calf (1984). She creates her illustrations by starting with a pencil drawing, then builds up the image using coloured modelling clay to give it a three-dimensional effect. The result is then photographed and used as an illustration. The resulting illustrations are "detail rich" and often "invoke laughter and wonder."
Reid's work has been published in over 21 countries, including Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, China, Germany, Brazil and Thailand.
Awards and honours
In 2006, Reid won the Canadian Library Association's Children's Illustrator of the Year award.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Barbara Reid” as canadian illustrator and writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q44606043. The first chronological checks are 1957, 2012, 1984 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Reid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.