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 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. 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. She works in an atticstudio "with views of the South Downs".
Career
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. 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 Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, recognising Wolves as the previous year's best-illustrated new children's book published in the United Kingdom. By that time, rights had been sold in five other countries. Next year she made the Greenaway shortlist for Orange Pear Apple Bear. The year after that she won a second Medal for her fourth book, Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, and made the shortlist as well for fifth book, Monkey and Me. WorldCat reports that Orange Pear Apple Bear is her work most widely held in participating libraries. According to one library summary, it "xplores concepts of color, shape, and food using only five simple words, as a bear juggles and plays." For 2008 Gravett was official illustrator for World Book Day — an honor with duties such as specially commissioned illustrations and recorded demonstration of characters from her books. The current Children's LaureateJulia Donaldson wrote and Gravett illustrated Cave baby, a 32-page picture book featuring a prehistoric baby's tour atop a woolly mammoth, published by Macmillan in 2010. It has been published in Welsh-language and Chinese editions but not in the United States. With that one exception as of September 2012, Gravett has been the writer and illustrator of all her published work: thirteen picture books including four board books, all published by MacMillan.
Style
Gravett completed Wolves in six weeks as an illustration course project and added only the back endpaper spread during the editorial process. Some projects take longer but she wrote and sketched Orange Pear Apple Bear in merely 11 hours, waking one Mother's Day with the four words in her head and staying in bed for "the whole book in one go". Gravett's books are interactive. She encouraged the pet dog to chew the dummy for Wolves "to simulate the impact of the wolf's teeth". That didn't work so she chewed it herself. She wanted Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears to look genuinely chewed, so she painted yoghurt on plain white paper and laid it in the cage of the two pet rats. They nibbled it and peed on it, which she scanned to produce background for drawing. The front cover illustration shows the title Little Mouse's Emily Gravett's Big Book of Fears, a mouse looking through a hole it has chewed, and damage along the book edges. Little Mouse is also a movable book, with "lift flaps and a fold-out map".
