Charlie Mackesy Books in Order

Charlie Mackesy was born in Northumberland in 1962 and grew up in the rural north of England. Horses were part of the landscape early on, and he was drawing them by the age of six. Animals still sit at the center of much of his work, not as cute extras, but as companions who can say difficult things simply.

Formal education did not turn him neatly toward an art career. He attended Radley College and Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, then briefly tried art college. He left after a week, worried that staying might make him lose the urge to create.

Drawing remained the thing he came back to.

When Mackesy was 18, his best friend Jamie was killed in a car crash. He began drawing more intensely as a way to get through the loss, and he kept going. It was not a polished career plan. It was a habit that became a lifeline.

His early professional work was varied. He worked as a cartoonist for The Spectator and illustrated books for Oxford University Press. Over time, his drawings, paintings, sculptures, and lithographs appeared in books, galleries, private collections, and public spaces. His bronze work can be found in London, including at Highgate Cemetery and on Brompton Road.

He has also used art for collaborative projects. Mackesy worked with Nelson Mandela on The Unity Series, a lithograph project, and made drawings with Richard Curtis for a Comic Relief auction during the filming of Love Actually.

His best-known characters arrived gradually. Mackesy had returned to working in ink and watercolor after illustrating another book, then began drawing a boy, a mole, a fox, and a horse. As the pictures accumulated, a loose story emerged around questions he had been carrying about life, fear, success, kindness, and what people need from one another.

The result was The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, published in 2019. Its boy is curious and uncertain, the mole is hungry and cheerfully opinionated, the fox is wary after being hurt, and the horse offers calm without pretending to have every answer. Readers often come to the book for its spare handwritten conversations and return to it for its reminders about friendship, asking for help, and being gentler with themselves.

The book reached millions of readers, was translated widely, and won both Waterstones Book of the Year and Barnes & Noble Book of the Year in 2019. Mackesy later co-wrote and co-directed its animated adaptation, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2023.

In Always Remember, he returned to the same four friends and their wide, weathered landscape. The new book keeps the focus close to the things his work has long cared about: staying connected, making room for fear, and finding a little light on hard days.

Away from the studio, Mackesy co-runs Mama Buci, a honey social enterprise in Zambia that helps families with limited incomes become beekeepers. He lives between Brixton and Suffolk, with his dog Barney.