Bunny peculiar: Former traveller Emily Gravett is picking up awards for her quirky animal fables

Most writers are in flight from the day job. Emily Gravett has never had one, but fear of the nine-to-five has long been a motivating force. When she graduated from a degree course in illustration just four years ago, her partner Mik, a plumber, told her: "You've got two years to make it work, then I'm giving you a set of drainpipes." Emily laughs at the memory, but her determination is clear: "That was my alternative life," she says, "and I didn't want to live it."

It seems unlikely that she'll be picking up a plunger anytime soon. In the last month alone, the children's author-illustrator has published a book, been official artist for World Book Day, and, last week, was named by the Big Picture Campaign as one of the country's Best New Illustrators. Of the 10 winners chosen in this initiative, led by Booktrust and supported by a range of children's publishers, it's fair to say that none has carved out a more unusual route to success than Gravett, a former traveller who spent eight years living on the road before deciding that drawing was her way to a better life.

In 1989, aged 16 and a few months into her A-levels, Gravett had "a bit of a teenage rebellion". "I had a boyfriend who was a student teacher. He got a work placement on the travellers' school bus for a few weeks and I went with him. Then, when he left, I didn't come home. I just kept going." She lived all over the UK on travellers' sites, first in a bender (a dome-shaped shelter made from hazel or willow), then a leaky caravan, and finally – once she'd met up with Mik – a 30ft ex-army bus named Toby Diesel. As they chugged around the country at 10 miles to the gallon, Mik went fruit picking and Emily busked.

Then their daughter, Oleander, arrived in 1997. "We were living on site in West Wales and she was very ill when she was born. Having been in the Special Care Unit, where it was all clean and you're washing yourself like mad, we brought her back into the bus. It was an inch deep in dog hair," she recalls, "and you didn't even want to put her down really." But they were in it another year before they found someone to take them on as tenants. Alone in a Pembrokeshire cottage all day with the baby, Emily missed the travelling community and wondered how to survive. Books provided the answer.

"I started reading to Olly when she was weeks old," remembers Emily. But access to books was problematic. They couldn't join the library at first – as bus dwellers, they had no permanent address for the forms – so some came from car boot sales but many were made by Emily herself. Were they any good? "Noooo," she laughs. "I have actually still got them and I read them thinking, ohmigod, how embarrassing."

When Olly was three, Mik decided to train as a plumber. He brought home the local college prospectus which Emily picked up: "I was having this little fantasy about getting out of the house and I thought I could go and draw." She applied for a foundation course and, by the first week's end, knew what she wanted to do. "I was, like, 'Wheeehaay!' I want to go to university and I want to be an illustrator. I was really excited about it."

So the family moved to Brighton where, despite a lack of qualifications, Emily fought her way on to a degree course in 2001 and turned all her college projects into children's books. In her final year, she entered two of them – Wolves and Orange Pear Apple Bear – for the Macmillan Prize. She had, she recalls, entered the previous year, "with a book about being burnt to death in a fire". (She lets out a peal of laughter, before explaining that it was set inside a box of matches.) This time, she won. Macmillan published both books and asked for another. The Odd Egg, published last month, is her sixth. She now has a stack of prizes – Kate Greenaway medals, Nestle awards – to find shelf-room for.

Her style is a charming mixture of delicate line drawings, watercolours and collages in combination with some winningly awful puns. Her debut, Wolves, about a rabbit who unwisely borrows a book about lupine predators, comes with removable library tickets and overdue letters from the "Public Burrowing Library". The Odd Egg, about a duck who wants an egg of his own and ends up hatching something unexpected from one he finds along the way, maintains another Gravett trademark, the surprise ending.

She's wildly enthusiastic about her fellow winners on the Best New Illustrators list, but diffident about seeing her work alongside theirs. An exhibition at the Illustration Cupboard in London will showcase the 10, and she admits that her pieces don't get framed too often. "I'm not the kind of illustrator who produces a finished, double-page spread. My work is done on computer and scanned in, so it can look quite rough. I'll be the one sidling up to it, looking at it out of the corner of my eye..."

Fellow winner Oliver Jeffers is a little more used to the experience. A Northern Irish painter who's been shown everywhere from London to Sydney, he's working at his New York studio when we speak and will fly in for the opening. He too has a stack of awards, particularly for his trio of books (How to Catch a Star, Lost and Found and The Way Back Home) about a daydreaming boy and his adventures. He's also something of an accidental illustrator: "I make all kinds of art and picture books are one aspect of that. I got into them because I was interested generally in the relationship between words and pictures and discovered that they were the perfect marriage of how the two interact."

What makes a great picture book? Jeffers and Gravett agree that you have to write for yourself: "I don't think you can sit there and think totally about the kids you're writing for and get a good book," she says. "You have to think, 'I want to do this because I really want to draw that duck' – that's my main motivation for The Odd Egg." Both have vivid memories of titles that inspired them as children. For Gravett, it's The Giant Jam Sandwich, of which she is the proud owner of a (recently) signed copy. Jeffers loved Eric Carle's The Bad-Tempered Ladybird, the last page of which he tried many times to recreate.

Helen Mackenzie Smith, the editorial director for picture books at Random House and a steering committee member since the launch of the Big Picture campaign last year, joined up because she was worried about what she terms "the classics of the future". Glancing down the bestseller lists, she saw perennials such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are but, leaving those and the TV tie-ins aside, says she began to think: "OK, what's this list going to look like in 50 years' time? We'll be in trouble if we don't start encouraging and nurturing new talent now." From the publishers' viewpoint, the market has been struggling recently: with overheads high, booksellers are reducing the ranges and quantities they stock. The squeeze is on. But she's found the campaign "really heartening", uniting the industry in its need to communicate. "In this country, we've got an astonishing tradition of illustration, as the Best New Illustrators competition is showing," she believes. "There are a few books that do very well, but there should be more of them reaching classic status. We need to keep supporting picture books and keep shouting about them. "

Emily Gravett remains optimistic: "I know the industry says that sales aren't good, but there are so many people out there putting a lot of thought and effort and imagination into it that I actually think this should be a golden age for illustration." However, she takes nothing for granted for herself. She's keeping up her rate of two books a year, just in case. So, could she still find herself thumbing through the trades section of the college prospectus? Not any more. "Even if it all stopped tomorrow," she says thoughtfully, "I'd have to keep drawing." We should all be grateful for that.

'The Odd Egg' by Emily Gravett is published by Macmillan (£10.99). Booktrust's Big Picture campaign has events planned throughout 2008. See www.bigpicture.org.uk for more information.

Interesting? Click here to explore further