The Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize is one of New Zealand’s leading illustration prizes with over thousand entries since 2019. The prize has since paved the way for eight emerging artists to have their illustrations published by Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand.

The 2022 Illustration prize winner, Jessica Twohill, re-imagined Margaret Mahy’s quintessential children’s favourite The Witch in the Cherry Tree which will be published this August.

This year the Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize creates a unique opportunity for an unpublished New Zealand-based illustrator to showcase Seventeen Kings and Forty-Two Elephants. Originally published in 1972 this poem is one of Mahy’s earliest works.