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Louise Yates

Louise Yates is a children's writer and illustrator. She read English at Christ Church, Oxford and studied and taught at The Royal Drawing School, London. Her first book, A Small Surprise, was published by Random House in 2009. In 2010, she won the Prince of Wales’ Award For Portrait Drawing at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Annual Exhibition. Dog Loves Books was published in 2010, debuted as a New York Times Bestseller and won the Parents’ Choice Award in the US. In the UK, Dog Loves Books won the 2010 Roald Dahl Funny Prize and was nominated (along with Frank and Teddy Make Friends, 2011; Dog Loves Drawing, 2012; and Dog Loves Counting, 2014) for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Dog Loves Drawing was shortlisted for the Red House Children's Book Award in 2013. HM The Queen read Dog Loves Books to a public audience at the Hay Festival in 2011;  Dolly Parton read Dog Loves Books as a Cbeebies Book at Bedtime in 2017, and has distributed over 10,000 free copies of the Dog Loves series to children aged 0-5 via Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. A musical adaptation of Dog Loves Books premiered and toured nationwide in the US, in 2015. The book has been adapted as an animated TV series for the BBC in the UK and is broadcast in Germany, Australia, and many other territories globally in numerous languages. Louise lives with her husband and three children in West Dorset.