Ben Gilliland

Ben Gilliland was born in Britain in January 1976 in Darlington, County Durham. He studied illustration at the University of the West of England and has worked on a wide range of books for children and adults. He is an author and illustrator as well as a science writer and journalist, known for his unique style of blending geography, history, and art, using colourful visuals and clever layouts to explain complex ideas in an easy-to-understand way.

From 1999 until 2010 Gilliland worked at the Metro Newspaper in London, initially as the graphics editor. In 2005 he was appointed as editor of MetroCosm, the paper’s popular graphics-based science feature created by Gilliland. After leaving the Metro in 2010, Gilliland pursued a career as a freelance science writer and educator while continuing to create the Cosm series and publish them via CosmOnline. In April 2015 he was appointed as editor of Astronomy Now magazine. In 2013 Gilliland was awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Award (popularly known as an “Arthur”) for Space Achievement in Media.[1] The award was presented at the UK Space Conference at the Glasgow Science Centre by Tim Peake the UK’s first ESA astronaut.

Gilliland is particularly recognised for combining art with information, especially through maps, diagrams, and visual storytelling and creating detailed and engaging non-fiction books that make learning fun, such as A History of Pictures for Children, which he illustrated with David Hockney, and 100 Maps That Will Change the Way You See the World. He is the author of DK’s 100 People Who Made History: Meet the People Who Shaped the Modern World (published in 2012). The book is a children’s non-fiction history book that introduces 100 important people from different fields like science, politics, exploration, and art. It includes figures such as Aristotle, Marie Curie, and Mark Zuckerberg, with short, easy-to-understand profiles and lots of illustrations. Science But Not as We Know it: Cutting-edge Concepts Made Simple, explores difficult ideas and theories and are compared to everyday things we are familiar with. Forces become armies, and electrons have personalities. This book will have you saying ‘I get it now!’ over and over again. You no longer have to be a rocket scientist to understand rocket science. Through his creative approach, Ben Gilliland has readers explore the world and learn new concepts through visually rich and imaginative illustrations.