D. M. Cornish

D. M. Cornish (born 1972 in Adelaide, South Australia) is an Australian writer and illustrator. He studied illustration at the University of South Australia, where over years of note-taking he built up the invented world of the "Half-Continent," filling more than twenty notebooks with maps, creatures, and history before a chance meeting with a children's publisher turned that world into a book. The result was the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy — Foundling (2006), Lamplighter (2008), and Factotum (2010) — a densely worldbuilt fantasy series he also illustrated, following an orphan boy apprenticed into a world of monster-hunters and biological alchemy. Foundling won the 2006 Aurealis Award for best young adult novel. He later added the short-fiction collection Tales from the Half-Continent (2014) to the sequence.