Emily Gravett is having her picture taken, peering out from behind a pot stuffed with paintbrushes, pens and a couple of errant penny whistles. “I wondered where they’d got to,” she says, laughing as the photographer removes them from view.

Whistles?

“I used to busk…”

Now the multiawardwinning creator of 11 picture books, Gravett, 38, would be the first to admit her career path has been unorthodox. After leaving school at 15 (“Stanley Deason in East Brighton – it’s been shut down now, it was rubbish!”) she lived on the road for eight years with her partner Mik, in a van nicknamed Toby Diesel.

She stumbled into illustration almost by accident, making books to entertain their baby daughter Oleander and to stop herself from “climbing the walls” when stuck at home caring for her.

In 2001, she took things a step further and enrolled on Brighton University’s BA Illustration course. While hardly an untutored talent – her art teacher mum and printmaker dad taught her to draw – Gravett had been out of education for more than a decade and had no idea how to use her skills.

“More than anything, the course gave me the time to work it out.”

Success came quickly and unexpectedly; on graduating she won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Macmillan Prize for Illustration for Wolves, the pun-packed tale of a bunny who gets more than he bargained for when he takes a book about wolves from the public “burrowing” library.

A publishing deal followed.

“Those first few years after uni were so exciting,”Gravett says fondly. “I never expected any of it and there were all these things I’d just never thought about – giving interviews, speaking in public, having my photo taken.”

She has since built up quite a collection of gongs including another Kate Greenaway Medal (for 2008’s Little Mouse’s Big Book Of Fears), several Nestlé Children’s Books prizes, and a clutch of Booktrust awards.

Today, the family lives in a smart house in Hertford Road, Hollingdean, its walls adorned with framed copies of Gravett’s drawings. Up a winding staircase is her attic studio where a homemade sign urges: “Think harder!”.

“I’m really bad for daydreaming,” she admits, “It annoys me that you can’t see out of the windows up here.”

But a certain amount of daydreaming is integral to her work – how else to arrive at stories of lonely chameleons, globetrotting meerkats and, her latest, Again!, about an excitable young dragon who pushes his longsufferingmumto incendiary levels?

“It’s sort of observational drawing, but from your mind,”

she says of creating a book.

“You can always see a character in your head but it can be harder getting it on to paper.”

She mentions Cave Baby, a collaboration with Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson and the first time she’d illustrated for someone else. “I got to know him by the end but there were a lot of rejects initially – you know, that’s not him… that’s not him. There he is! ”

Although she’s conquered her fear of drawing people, Gravett is happiest with animals. She has an impressive knack for conveying a gamut of emotions through the twitch of a tail or droop of ears.

“You have more freedom with animals, I think. Humans are very good at reading other humans but the way we express emotions is so subtle and drawing it is really difficult. I think children empathise more with animals anyway. When I was a kid, I’d much rather have cuddled an animal than got affectionate with another little kid.”

Gravett was a bookish child and can still reel off favourites – Raymond Briggs, Judith Kerr, The Giant Jam Sandwich [illustrated by artist and former Brighton University illustration professor John Vernon Lord].

Growing up in the 1970s, she was spoilt for choice.

“We were the first generation to get proper picture books – they didn’t start making them until the early ’60s. I loved them.”

Like Briggs and Kerr, Gravett doesn’t shy away from introducing scary elements in her work – “I think sometimes writers underestimate children” – and she understands the power of humour.

She’ll always tip a wink to the parents reading her books night after night. “I write for myself mainly – if I enjoy it, there’s a good chance someone else will. But you’re writing for a whole family really.”

Her daughter must have been an inspiration too?

“I never really got ideas from her, no. I’d think about what she’d like to read, definitely, but not about things she’d said or done. And of course she’s 14 now.”A year younger than Gravett was when she had her “teenage rebellion”… “I know! I keep looking at her and thinking, when’s it going to happen? When’s she going to do it? But she’s much more conscientious than I was.

She’s more academic.”

Gravett describes herself as lazy when she was at school.

“I just wanted to have fun.

I knew from the age of 14 that I wanted to leave home as soon as possible and the squatting movement and traveller lifestyle seemed romantic.

And it was in a way. I’m glad I was a part of it.”

She found the return to education painful – at 28, she was ten years older than her fellow students and a mother to boot – but she doesn’t think it could have happened any earlier.

“If I’d gone to college straight from school I’d have lunched it out and come out with a substandard degree.

I had to grow up a bit and I think this was a better way round for me.”

Though the dreadlocks are long gone, there’s still something of the rebel about Gravett, sitting barefoot in her studio. She and Mik, a plumber, have never married, despite watching friends slowly cave in to convention.

“We’ve been together 21 years, what’s going to change? I just can’t see the point of it and I certainly don’t want to change my name. I hate the idea of being called Mrs!”

She admits that, occasionally, she doesn’t behave exactly as a children’s illustrator should.

“I have sworn in front of children a couple of times – totally by accident and I’ve been mortified! Luckily, the parents were fine about it.”

And she has a sort of, er, duvet nest in the corner of her studio. I assume it’s for her two beloved dogs. “It’s for me,”

she says sheepishly.

“I sometimes like to curl up there.”

They’ve recently bought a brokendown riot van as a project for Mik.

“It’s actually very similar to Toby Diesel, but it’s prettier somehow.”

Does she have itchy feet again?

“Just for holidays,” says the grown-up Gravett. “I like my central heating too much to go back on the road.”

l Emily Gravett will be at The Old Market, in Hove, at 11.30am today, reading from her latest book, Again!

Suitable for ages five to eight, tickets cost £4.

Call 01273 725306.