Jill Barklem was born in Epping in 1951. After an accident when she was thirteen, she was unable to take part in PE or games at school and instead developed her talent for drawing and art. On leaving school, she studied illustration at St Martin's in London. Barklem is a full-time illustrator, working on the expanding series of books about the mice of Brambly Hedge. She spent five years on research before she started to write her first stories about the mice of Brambly Hedge.[1] Her interest in natural history and her curiosity about traditional rural customs and crafts have spilled over into these chronicles of hedgerow life.
Barklem is married and lives with her husband and her two children, Elizabeth and Peter, in a house near Epping Forest.