Nicola Kent - Illustrator

Nicola Kent is an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books that have been published in over 20 different languages.

Nicola has been working with words and pictures all her life. She did a degree in Art and English, worked as a TV producer for the BBC and Channel 4, wrote scripts for children’s animation, and finally kickstarted her dream of a career in children’s books via an MA in Children’s Book Illustration.

Nicola likes her books to feel handmade as if created at the kitchen table especially for her reader. Her illustrations are made with ink, watercolour, pencil and various printing techniques which she collages together digitally.

Nicola grew up in Holloway, London and now lives up the road in Hackney with her family, cat and dog. She loves gardening and cycling and thinks knowing how and when to be silly is one of the most important life skills.

Nicola has a tracheostomy and a very quiet voice. This was caused by damage to her airway during treatment in intensive care when she was a child, and multiple surgeries since. The left side of her diaphragm is also paralysed which means her breathing is difficult on stairs or hills!

Nicola’s experience of chronic health issues and disability are very specific but have given her insight into more universal challenges of coping with difference. She also understands from many years of experience the difficulties of juggling normal life with the patient’s life: treatment, appointments and health admin all add to the often tiring repercussions of functioning with a physical difficulty. And through her direct experience of a sudden and critical childhood illness, she has great empathy and understanding of children coping with the aftermath of trauma.

Nicola’s books often draw on her personal experience to create universal ideas that resonate widely, for example in The Strongest Mum and Giraffe and a Half. She regards warm humour as massively important and feels strongly that books that give those qualities to children can be hugely healing as well as entertaining and life affirming.

Nicola feels strongly that children with differences and disabilities should also feature in books in which that difference or disability is not the focus. Most people with a disability do not want it to define them. In Measuring Me, for example, there is a girl with a tracheostomy and a boy with a walking frame, but these are incidental in a book which is about extraordinary facts of measurement and scale in the human body.

Nicola enjoys events and school visits and feels it’s important and valuable that children are given the opportunity to meet people living with a disability who are also getting to work in a dream job!