Emma Yarlett, author of the divine "Poppy Pickle" and "Orion and the Dark" takes over ReaditDaddy for the day...!

We're immensely proud to host a blog takeover by one of our fave children's books author-illustrators, winner of THREE ReadItDaddy Book of the Week awards, let's hear it for awesome Emma Yarlett!
As I’m writing a blog post for the rather wonderful Read It Daddy who is ‘Dad’ to little Charlotte, I thought I would write about what I was like when I was a little Emma and how I got to where I am today.

So are you sitting comfortably? Now let me tell you a story about ‘Little Emma.’

Emma was very little, very little indeed. She had incredibly fluffy blonde hair and an egg-shaped birthmark on her leg. Other than that she was a very normal slightly shy little girl.

But even though Emma was very shy, had an egg on her leg and was very little she already had three very big passions! Emma liked to DRAW, Emma liked to COLOUR and Emma liked to READ*.

*She hadn’t quite worked out how to read yet, but in the meantime she liked to pretend.

These were Emma’s favourite books;

As Emma got older she read more and more and more, she drew more and more and more and she coloured, well, she coloured everything unfortunately.

But at school she wasn’t allowed to do so much drawing or colouring. She did lots of reading though and learned lots of other things, such as;

So when Emma was old enough to pick what subjects to do at school, she didn’t pick Art at all. In fact Emma picked lots of very un-arty subjects.

But Emma missed writing stories and drawing and colouring terribly. So in every spare moment she wrote and drew and coloured. Emma’s Mum and Dad could see that Emma wasn’t as happy as she could be and so they said...

Now, Emma didn’t know you could do this. But her parents, her friends and her family helped her to find out more about what jobs Emma could do. And then Emma heard a word she had never heard of before…

Emma thought that being an “illustrator” sounded like mighty fun. And so she started working hard towards making this happen. She drew and drew and drew and she wrote and wrote and wrote.

She went to a special school to study Art for a year. And then she went to an even more special place to study illustration; University.

Whilst Emma was at university she decided that she didn’t just want to be any old illustrator, she wanted to be a ‘children’s book illustrator.’ So she wrote and drew some book ideas and got on a plane with some friends to show some important people her ideas. She had to speak to a lot of people until she found someone that seemed to really like her work.

A week later Emma got something incredible in the post….

(HUGE APPLAUSE!)

A huge huge thanks to Emma Yarlett for guesting on our blog as part of the awesome Templar Publishing blog tour.

You can read our reviews of Emma's wonderful books right here!

"Poppy Pickle"

"Orion and the Dark"

"Sidney, Stella and the Moon"

and a lovely interview with Emma

And even MORE lovely books Emma has illustrated too!

Daddy's Going Away (with Lt Christopher MacGregor)

Bear's Big Bottom (with Steve Smallman, published by Little Tiger Press)

(All images © Emma Yarlett)