Cave Baby Award-winning team by Julia Donaldson (author) and Emily Gravett (illustrator)

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs.”

Emily Gravett is a graduate of Brighton University and winner of the 2004 Macmillan Prize for Illustration. Wolves, her first picture book was published in August 2005 and marked the beginning of an internationally stellar career creating extraordinary books for children including Orange Pear Apple Bear, Meerkat Mail and Matilda’s Cat. Her most recent picture book to be published by Macmillan is Little Mouse’s Big Book of Beasts, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. Emily has also illustrated Cave Baby which was written by the former children’s laureate Julia Donaldson.

Wolves was received with great acclaim across the children’s book world, winning many prizes including the prestigious CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal. In 2007, Emily won the Best Emerging Illustrator Award at the Booktrust Early Years Awards for Monkey and Me and the bronze award in the 6-8 category at the Nestle Children’s Book Prize for Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. In 2008 Emily was awarded her second CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears.

Emily was born in Brighton. She left school with few qualifications and spent 8 years living on the road (in a variety of vehicles including a truck, caravan and RAF petrol bus called Toby Diesel) before settling back in Brighton and getting a place on the BA (Hons) Illustration course at Brighton University. She lives in Brighton with her daughter Oleander, partner Mik and their two dogs Otto and Edie.