Astred Hicks
Author & Illustrator of Children’s Fiction
based in NSW
Astred Hicks is a publishing triple threat. She is a best-selling illustrator, highly awarded book designer and emerging author who has worked for Australian and international publishing houses with a particular focus on mid-grade fiction and children’s non-fiction. Most recently, she was awarded the Honour Book in the 2023 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards for Evie and Rhino, she won the Best Designed Children’s Book award in the Australian Book Design Awards for No Words and was shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Children’s Fiction for Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Astred is excited about noticing the world around her. Through her work in illustration, writing and speaking engagements, she strives to inspire wonder in young people by sharing her observations of the mini-worlds surrounding us, from the natural world to the wabi/sabi nature of street textures.
She regularly visits primary and secondary schools to share the creative processes of visual communication through:
- book design
- typography
- illustration
- design thinking
- creative noticing
2025 will be an exciting year for Astred as she celebrates her children’s non-fiction author-illustrator debut with This Bird, Spotting Birds that Share Our Urban Spaces (CSIRO publishing), which will be published in June. Meanwhile, her other fully illustrated children’s non-fiction book, Mind-Controlling Bugs (Hardie Grant Books), written by Aidan Doyle, will be published in February.
