Kim Lewis 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 things from an early age were drawing and making things. She still remembers her mother despairing over the constant request for materials and the subsequent art mess everywhere.

Kim did a Fine Art degree in Montreal, and then came to Hornsey College of Art in London to do postgraduate printmaking. She says she met some British people at university in Montreal and liked them so much that she wanted to come to the country where there were lots more of them. From the minute she arrived in England Kim says she felt completely at home. After Kim met her husband, Flea, at art school, they moved to Northumberland to live and work on a hill farm. Something about the landscape reminded her of home. Flea and Kim brought up their two children on the farm, along with the 650 blackface ewes, 100 suckler cows, twelve hens, six border collies and two cats. 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 work has always been detailed - she prefers to work from the observation of life, rather than from her imagination (which, says Kim, is never as amazing). 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 books for Walker Books, and Kim has been making picture books about her beloved countryside ever since.