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 (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.
Next year (officially dated 2007) she made the Greenaway shortlist for Orange Pear Apple Bear. The year after that she won a second Medal (no one has won three) 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 (United Kingdom) — an honor with duties such as specially commissioned illustrations and recorded demonstration of characters from her books.
The current Children's Laureate (2011–2013) Julia 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.
Read more about this topic: Emily Gravett
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