About Alison Lester
Although they loved teaching art, Alison Lester, a secondary art teacher by training, detested the structure of the classroom. In the days before the internet, when their first child was born, the couple decided they wanted to be able to work from home, so they pulled out their Yellow Pages phonebook, looked up Oxford University Press under Publishers, dialed the number, and begged for a job. Alison Lester had the good fortune to have three wonderful women interview their, who saw potential in their shabby portfolio and awarded them a book to illustrate. After illustrating other people's stories for five years, they started to become finicky about the texts and tried composing their own. As a result, they started writing and illustrating their own stories, which led to Clive Bites Alligators.