Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on questions from listeners. I really enjoyed the new format of the podcast (I love the traditional 3pp podcasts as well :-).
I thought I will share my experience here regarding the location question:
For book illustration, my experience is it does not really matter where you live in most of cases. As for the cultural aspect, it can be challenging in some projects. I am currently working on a non-fiction book about North American farms. The research is challenging since it is not possible for me to visit North American farms, I would have to rely on 2nd hand information such as film, books, rather than the first-hand experience.
If you are an author/illustrator, it can be challenging to do school visits and events if you are doing a book for the English market and live somewhere else. Hopefully, now that the virtual school visit is a thing, it might change up things a little.
There are other challenges that come with living in small European countries such as Norway. For example, It is difficult to start a shop for art prints - the postal fee for international shipping is really high, and the domestic market is relatively small. I recently have been thinking about the idea of opening a shop. But I hesitated. I might need to think more about how to come up with interesting digital products instead of producing something physical.
There are advantages as well: Norway has a couple of cultural grants which support illustrators, especially book illustrators, in order to keep the Norwegian language book alive. It is a very good resource to keep an eye on. I believe other small European countries have similar systems. It is not a lot of money but definitely helps to pay some bills.
The bottom line is if you look at the task of making book illustrations, it does not matter where you live. But if you think about illustration as a full time career, it probably still matters a great deal. But it is not necessarily always negative to live somewhere else, it is just different.