Emily Gravett

Emily Gravett (born 1972) is an English author and illustrator of children's picture books. For her debut book published in 2005 and again two years later, she won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal recognising the year's best-illustrated British children's book (no one has won three).

Emily Gravett was born in Brighton, England, the second daughter of a printmaker and an art teacher. After her parents split, she lived with her mother the teacher, but she and her father would "go out drawing" in museums. She left school at 16 with GCSE qualification only in Art (grade A) and travelled Great Britain for eight years, living in "a variety of vehicles" and meeting her partner Mik.

By 1997 they had settled in Wales and had a daughter Oleander (Olly). Gravett "realised that I wanted a career, and drawing was my only skill", so she began an Art course. The family returned to Brighton in 2001, where persistence rather than qualifications got her an interview for the Illustration degree course at the local university. She matriculated that September and graduated three years later.

As of June 2008 she lives in Brighton with Mik and Olly, now 11 years old. She works in an attic studio "with views of the South Downs".

During her second year as a student, Gravett entered one of her school projects for the MacMillan Prize for Children's Illustration, a competitive annual award to art students established in 1985. She earned a "Highly Commended" then and won the prize in her final year, when she entered two books that the judges ranked first and second. That ensured a contract publication of Wolves by Macmillan Children's Books (now the children's books imprint of Pan MacMillan). The editorial director later said, "It was quite obvious who the winner was going to be. Emily entered Wolves in a beautiful dummy format, and really we had to do very little work on it before it was published. She's a bookbinder as well as an artist; a real creator of books." Two years after graduation she won the Kate Greenaway Medal from the professional librarians, recognising Wolves as the previous year's (2005) best-illustrated new children's book published in the U.K. By that time, rights had been sold in five other countries.

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