What Zola Did on Thursday

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.

Melina Marchetta is a bestselling author in more than twenty countries and eighteen languages. She has published award-winning young adult, fantasy and crime fiction, including her acclaimed crime novel, Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil. Her much-loved Australian classic, Looking for Alibrandi, swept the pool of literary awards when it was published, and was also released as a film, adapted by Marchetta, winning an AFI Award and an Independent Film Award for best screenplay, as well as the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award. The companion novel to Marchetta’s award-winning book Saving Francesca, The Piper's Son, also received much acclaim in Australia and internationally, and in 2009 Marchetta won the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association for Jellicoe Road. She lives in Sydney.