Emily Gravett was born in Brighton, England, the second daughter of a printmaker father and an art teacher mother.
She left school at 16 with a 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.
[1] 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.
[4][5] WorldCat reports that Orange Pear Apple Bear is her work most widely held in participating libraries.
According to one library summary, it "[e]xplores concepts of color, shape, and food using only five simple words, as a bear juggles and plays.
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".
[1] 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.