Mac Barnett is a New York Times-bestselling author of stories for children. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Germany’s Jugendliteraturpreis, China’s Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award, The Netherlands’ Silver Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Orbil. He is the co-creator, with Jon Klassen, of Shape Island, a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+, based on their best-selling Shapes series of picture books. Mac lives in Oakland, California.

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"[Mac Barnett is] a great young writer of books for young people. If you haven't read his work, run somewhere and do that. Books for young people have a rich and I daresay limitless future—knock anyone who says otherwise into a ditch—and Mac has a central place within that limitless future. Don't bet against him or anyone like him."
— Dave Eggers

 "[In Barnett's books] there is no magic solution to any problem: The characters stumble through their dilemmas just as every one of us does. The world is a difficult yet good place, and there is no need for the typical rose-colored lenses that other children's books put on situations in order to fend off the bad stuff."
— Yiyun Li

“He is a believer that picture books can have Swiftian absurdity and untidy endings, and that ‘life is absurd, and kids know that.’”
— The San Francisco Chronicle


INTERVIEWS, ETC.
PictureBook Makers - September 2015
School Library Journal – April 2015
TED — September 2014
Let's Get Busy — September 2014
Art of the Picture Book — August 2014
Number Five Bus — April 2014
The Organist — October 2013
Book Riot — June 2013
The Children's Book Review — September 2012
School Library Journal — May 2010