The Brightest Christmas Star

Laura Motherway has spent 17 years delivering positively distracting programs for children and young people in hospital at the Starlight Children's Foundation and has worked as a singer, improviser, actor and director. She is currently the Strategic Creative Learning Manager for the cultural organisation FORM Building a State of Creativity, where she oversees creative learning programs including the Scribblers Literature Festival in Perth. The Brightest Christmas Star is her first book.

Deb’s illustration style celebrates colour, detail and texture. She enjoys drawing bright, happy, joyful everyday things. She works with coloured pencils on paper and refines digitally. She is currently illustrating a new chapter book series for 5-8 year olds, The Zola series. Written by best selling author Melina Marchetta and published through Penguin Books Australia.  The first book of the series of seven is to be released in June 2020. Deb illustrated her first children's book 'The Golden Thread', written by Amelia Donnelly and published by Lake press in 2018. She works from her studio in a seaside suburb in Melbourne, where she lives with her husband, 3 children, an energetic border collie and a bright yellow canary, who she loves to draw. Deb studied Fine Art at Griffith University in Queensland.