Lessons on success (and otherwise) from Charlie Mackesy.

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Last Friday I went to the Royal Albert Hall for an evening with Charlie Mackesy. I was effectively dragged along by my oldest friend, Sam (I wrote about our friendship here) who is a huge fan of his art. Of course, I knew about him already.

Every year when I return to my local Waterstones as a bookseller at Christmas we have a special table for Charlie’s books. We sell piles of them. I’d never actually looked inside one before last week. In fact, if I’m being honest, I was slightly sniffy about them, seeing them as probably containing a kind of ‘hallmark wisdom’ that I wouldn’t be interested in.

To my surprise, I spent this wonderful evening completely captivated by Charlie and his characters and was very unexpectedly moved. I spent quite a lot of it close to tears.

There’s something magical about the level of authenticity and connection that Charlie and his work exude. I looked around the Royal Albert Hall, and as well as hundreds and hundreds of children there were adults of a multitude of ages, races and genders, all spellbound by his words, art and the accompanying music (composed and performed by Isobel Waller-Bridge and the Cake Quartet).

Towards the end, Charlie opened up for a Q+A and in amongst the gorgeous and funny questions from children (and some wonderfully astute questions from grown-ups) I got to ask him how the success of The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse had impacted him and his creative process (way to bring the room down Jennie?! But I was really interested to hear what he had to say about this).