Walker Books is delighted to congratulate Vannysha Chang, who has been awarded the 2025 Sebastian Walker Award for Illustration. Diksha Pawaskar and Naomi Tipping were highly commended. This prestigious prize is run by Walker Books in collaboration with Anglia Ruskin University’s Cambridge School of Art MA in Children’s Book Illustration. The award was presented at a private viewing of the course exhibition held at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham, London, which is open 19th – 23rd February.
Vannysha Chang is an illustrator and painter from Central Java, Indonesia, currently living in the UK. She has a BDes in Communication Design from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada, where she lived for six years before moving to Cambridge for this MA. She mostly uses acrylic gouache which gives paintings a rich texture and vibrant opaque colours. Her work is very much inspired by the people in her life: her siblings, her friends, her peers. Layered underneath is her curiosity towards human connection and psychology, thinking about feelings and relationships, and visually interpreting them through colour and composition in her illustrations.
2025 marks the fourteenth year of the annual Sebastian Walker Prize, an award established by Walker Books in partnership with the Cambridge School of Art MA in Children’s Book Illustration. Find out more about the prize and past winners here.
Judges feedback
This year the Sebastian Walker Award was judged by the Walker Picture Book team, headed up by Ben Norland and Deirdre McDermott.
Deirdre McDermott, Picture Book Publisher said:
“Vannysha is the clear and unanimous winner of the Sebastian Walker Award for Illustration 2025. Her painterly picture book imagery has a very unique and original vision as well as her keen, humorous observation of children and their daily lives which is so friendly and happy. We all admired Vannysha’s unusual colour palette and her clever compositions made her stand out amongst the already high standard of her peers on the Cambridge MA Course this year. We look forward to seeing Vannysha’s picture books published in the future.”
Shelley Jackson, course leader at Cambridge School of Art said:
“We are so pleased that Vannysha has been chosen as the 2025 Sebastian Walker Award for Illustration recipient. Her painterly illustrations evoke childhood memories of carefree friendships. They are warm and lovely! We are also incredibly grateful to our friends at Walker Books for their continued support of our students through this award.”
Belinda Ioni Rasmussen, President and Publisher of the Walker Books Group, commented:
“Sebastian Walker founded Walker Books in 1978, making books that stood out for their vibrancy, quality and charm. Our collaboration on this award with the Cambridge School of Art is a fantastic way to honour that legacy, and celebrate new and enchanting illustration talent within children’s publishing.”