Kim Lewis
Kim Lewis is the author and illustrator of children’s picture books, from a series of real life farm stories to the imaginative world of a stuffed elephant called Harry. She has always tried to capture the wonders of a child’s life in the countryside.
Kim grew up in a sleepy suburb of the city of Montreal, in Canada. As a child, she always wished she’d been brought up on a farm. Her favourite activities from an early age were drawing and making things. She still remembers her mother despairing over the constant request for materials and the subsequent mess everywhere.
Kim did a Fine Art Degree in Montreal, and then came to Hornsey College of Art in London to do postgraduate printmaking. After she met her husband. Flea, they moved to Northumberland to live on a working hill farm, where something about the landscape reminded her of home. Flea and Kim brought up their two children on the farm, along with 650 blackface ewes, 100 suckler cows, twelve hens, six border collies and two cats. After 25 years of farming Kim and Flea and their border collie Fen have now moved to a cottage over the hill and not very far away, with the same spectacular views. She says she will never leave or cease to love the countryside in Northumberland.
Kim began her artistic career as a printmaker, working especially in the area of stone lithography. Her art has always been detailed, and she prefers to work from the observation of life. Her favourite subject matter is found in the quiet corners of the farm where machinery and animals rest, woolsacks are stacked, and the barns are weathered to a hundred years’ sort of grey.
Encouraged by an illustrator friend, Kim decided to tell the story of the shepherding year for her son James, who was three at the time. That began a series of farm stories for Walker Books, and Kim has been making picture books about her beloved countryside ever since.