Brian Selznick

Biography

Brian Selznick (born 1966) is an author and illustrator who worked at Eames House and as a bookseller at a children's bookstore before publishing Hugo Cabret. His background in visual art and his lifelong love of cinema — particularly early cinema — led him to create a book that merged illustrated storytelling with prose narrative in a way that hadn't been attempted at this scale. Selznick spent two years researching Méliès and the history of early French cinema, visiting the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris (where the automata that inspired the novel are kept) and studying the mechanics of clockwork figures. The novel began as his attempt to answer a question: what would happen if you told a story using the techniques of cinema — close-ups, tracking shots, cross-cutting — inside a book?

Brian Selznick at a glance