Ed Vere: Being compassionate, kind, gentle, empathetic and creative isn’t a weakness, it’s part of being a fully rounded human being
- Charlotte Owen-Burge
- May 22
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 19
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Ed Vere is one of Britain’s best-loved author-illustrators, known for picture books – like How to be a Lion and The Artist – that champion quiet courage, creativity and compassion. But there’s a deeper current running through his work – one shaped by a lifelong connection to the natural world.
In this conversation with The Skylark, Vere talks about teaching children to notice things, why boredom is underrated, and how the fences we build – on farms, in classrooms, around wildlife – do more harm than good.
My first memories are from when I was four, when we rented a farmhouse in the Peak District. We didn’t farm the land, but we lived there for a few years before moving to a nearby village when I was about eight. Those first memories are of absolute freedom, nature, and running completely and utterly wild. We weren’t close to anywhere, so my brother and I could just run through the fields and explore. We were friendly with Farmer Higginbottom and Farmer David, who’d let us steer the tractor, ‘help’ with hay baling – all of that. It was a bucolic existence, and I loved it.
I also loved drawing. By the time I was five, I had a pretty clear idea that I wanted to either be a farmer or someone who drew pictures. I probably didn’t know the word “artist” yet, but the idea was there. So my first recollections are just of sunlight, freedom, happiness and nature – completely unrestrained.
I don’t want to suggest that if you didn’t grow up in the countryside, you can’t appreciate it. But I do think there’s a certain kind of understanding you gain when it’s in your bones from childhood. For me, I always feel most sane when I’m walking in the country, especially climbing hills. I remember a sense of stillness and peace being surrounded by nature. You’re not searching for something – just being in it is enough.
I lived in the countryside until I was eighteen, then went to art school in London and stayed in the city for 30 years. I was distracted for a long time by the excitement – meeting brilliant minds, other artists; being part of something vibrant. But over time, that sense of something missing grew stronger. Now where I live, within minutes I can be out in open fields. There’s a rewilded area around a lake where we see egrets, marsh harriers, even a barn owl on dusk walks. I cycle across the Downs and feel euphoric. There’s something about using your body out in nature, about unhooking your mind and just experiencing it.
That physical engagement matters. I never felt it in London – maybe a few nights in my twenties in nightclubs, but that’s a different thing entirely! Nature gave me back something I hadn’t realised I’d lost.
A loose sketch can hold emotion and suggestion in ways words sometimes can’t.
I co-created a visual literacy course called The Power of Pictures with CLPE, which helps primary school teachers to understand the importance of visual literacy using picture books and drawing across all year groups. One of the most important things we try to communicate in that course is the need for mental space – for slowing down, for day-dreaming You can’t always be creative. Your cup has to be full before you can pour anything meaningful out of it. And for me, being in nature is one of the ways I fill that cup.
It’s often in those quieter moments – when I’m walking – that something begins to take shape. There’s a kind of back-of-the-mind thinking that happens when I walk. It’s a vital stage at the start of any creative project – this amorphous cloud of a thought that starts to take shape, but if you try and describe it with words too soon, it becomes overly concrete and collapses. Drawing helps keep that ambiguity alive. A loose sketch can hold emotion and suggestion in ways words sometimes can’t. Being in nature gives my mind the space it needs for that kind of thinking. Allowing children to draw as part of a written project allows them to engage in this looser but very productive form of thinking.
Often when I work, it doesn’t look like work. It can look like a relaxed existence (to the annoyance of my girlfriend). When I’m in the flow of a project – when I’m inspired, I work hard – seven days a week. I’ll wake up early and work until two in the morning. A huge amount of that energy comes after a period of quiet gestation. The ideas then flow out of me, almost completely formed. That gestation happens when I allow myself to be still.
Children are naturally connected to that space. A loose, free-thinking space. Most young children love to draw. At some point, many stop – often it can be because they start to believe there’s a right and a wrong way (there isn’t). They compare themselves to others. They start to think they’re not good at it. The important thing to tell them is that it is the unique quality of their voice that is important, not how skillfully they’ve rendered something…and certainly not the correct insertion of a fronted adverbial in a written piece. We should be noticing the creative content of their work, not just ‘marking’ the grammatical construction.
We end up not listening to children’s voices and only placing importance on a set of rules. Drawing lacks rules…which is maybe why the curriculum fears it. Because so few teachers are trained in art, many don’t feel confident teaching it, and that lack of confidence can be passed on. Many teachers haven’t drawn since they lost confidence in it when they were at school. We aim to give teachers their confidence back, to use drawing in the classroom. Drawing is innate – it’s an outlet for thought and emotion. It’s one of the few ways children can express what’s going on inside. We mustn’t let it wither through neglect. Once we lose that vital outlet for self-expression, we don’t often find something else to replace it with. In this age of understanding around mental health that is a huge loss.
That’s what I try to address through The Power of Pictures, and through my books too. In fact, many of my books are about listening to our own quiet interior voice and maintaining creative confidence. How to Be a Lion came out of a moment in 2016 when I was touring America and saw Trump and Clinton debating. The book world was in shock. Trump’s voice – hectoring, with a deeply restricted view of what masculinity is – was about to become a dominant influence. I wanted to write something to counter that way of being. Something for the gentler among us, to say: it’s okay to be you; being compassionate, kind, gentle, empathetic and creative isn’t a weakness, it’s part of being a fully rounded human being.
When I was at primary school, I was shy and pretty quiet. I didn’t like football. There were louder, dominating voices – peer pressure to be a certain way. School can be hard in that way – those first steps into the world where people start telling you not to be yourself. So How to Be a Lion became a way of saying: respect your voice. Trust it. And a big part of hearing your own voice is remembering that we are part of nature.
Leonard the lion, in that book, is at his most creative on his thinking hill, looking out at the natural world. I love reading that part to children. I slow it down, let them feel it: the sun warming his back, the grass beneath his paws. You can see them imagining it – that first touch of spring warmth after a long winter. There’s even a German word for it – Frühlingsgefühl, which translates roughly as “spring feelings” – the rush of warmth, optimism, and vitality that comes with the first warm days after winter.
That connection – between creativity, peace and nature – became even clearer when I travelled to Kenya with the Born Free Foundation. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I’d written How to Be a Lion, and by pure serendipity, I ended up meeting the inspirational Virginia McKenna, who co-founded Born Free, through a friend on a train back from the Hay Festival.
I wanted to paint lions, so I asked her if they would like an artist-in-residence, and by the following February, I was flying out to Kenya. For four and a half weeks, I travelled through Amboseli and Meru with Born Free’s team. I painted, I photographed, I sketched wildlife from the top of their Land Rover. Drawing wildlife is difficult –everything is in constant motion. Elephants are the easiest to draw – they move slowly as they graze. The roof of the Land Rover had a viewing hatch which flipped down into a perfect watercolour painting table. We’d park up in total silence and just watch all of this beautiful life. Like Eden. It was the most incredible experience I’ve had, seeing this thriving abundance of life...Thriving if we don’t overstep our bounds.
There’s something indescribable about that. About being present in a moment, painting animals as they move through their world, undisturbed. I’ll never forget it. I’m slowly putting together a book that tells of that experience, about the problems that face the natural world, and how we can help. The book aims to instil a love of nature in kids who have grown up in an urban environment – if they don’t know it and love it, they may not be inspired to make the sacrifices to save it when they’re older.
There were moments of real danger, too. A young lion once ambled straight up to the Land Rover. If you’ve seen the film Born Free you’ll know that lions love to jump up on Land Rovers! We were standing through the pop-top hatch of the Land Rover, completely exposed. He advanced, slowly; a predator prowl, feet away, and gave an almighty snarl as he passed, as if to say, “I’m the boss here.” And then disappeared immediately behind us as we were frozen to spot with fear. We eventually turned to find, with relief, that he was lying down enjoying our shade. I tell that story to children – with a bit of theatrical relish – they’re always completely hooked. Particularly by where ‘we’ feature on the food chain – what defenceless, fleshy creatures we are in comparison. It sharpens the senses and teaches a great respect for the natural world.
It tells us: we are not in charge. Not there. Ultimately, not anywhere. Nature will wipe us out if it has to – if we can’t respect the delicate balance we’re living in. In Meru, I was sleeping alone in a tent in the jungle, 200 yards from anything else. Troops of baboons came bustling and crashing through, yards away, in the mornings. There might be leopards, snakes, anything. That’s certainly not rural Sussex! That’s a place you enter with deep respect.
And what was extraordinary was seeing how local communities live in that landscape. The Maasai children walk through it to school. They live with nature, not apart from it. Organisations like Lion Guardians work with those communities – tracking lions, helping mitigate conflict with farmers. They do incredible work. Born Free also works with communities to both educate and to lessen human/animal conflict. Building predator-proof bomas which means livestock is protected and doesn’t get eaten by lions, and consequently lions don’t get poisoned or speared by the farmers. There is still so much to do as human settlements, roads and farms encroach on the last remaining wild spaces.
Migration is the lifeblood of those ecosystems. Animals move, and predators follow. But fences, roads, development – all of this human infrastructure blocks those routes. And when you break the migratory chain, everything suffers.
We’ve made a concrete border around ourselves and decided nothing can cross it.
In England, we’ve already done it. The landscape here is entirely manmade. It has beauty, yes. But it’s not wild. And when we stop wildlife from moving – from broadening the genetic pool, from travelling to find food or shelter – we choke it off. Wild places are vanishing. We’ve made a concrete border around ourselves and decided nothing can cross it. From guns to antibacterial sprays, we poison, shoot or banish anything that tries.
Joined-up ecological thinking is hard to come by, especially at a government level. Nature always seems to come low down the list. But it shouldn’t. It’s not a luxury. It’s foundational. Without it, everything collapses. Nature needs open space, free from us.
In Bhutan, for instance, there’s just one major road that ribbons through the whole country. The rest is forested, wild, untouched. Much remains unknown. Many people there believe in the existence of the Yeti, and maybe they’re right to! The point is, nature still has space to breathe there. It hasn’t been carved up and administered to death, the way ours has.
We humans love borders. Dividing fields. Drawing lines on maps. But they’re deeply unnatural. They kettle wildlife – and wildlife cannot function that way.
So yes, I want to fly the flag for nature. I want children to grow up curious, kind, and caring for nature – not because they’re told to, but because they’ve had the chance to fall in love with it. And sometimes that starts simply – with drawing, observing, and being still.
My godfather’s partner, Jan Pieńkowski once said to me, “There’s so much theatre in life – if you stop and really look – seeing people’s body language, their expressions. If you draw it, you start to understand it and you remember it.” He was right. I carry that with me. I draw everywhere I go. Not to create something perfect, but to understand and see; to fix it in my memory. To let my mind unfold across it. It is an act of noticing, and when you notice life, you notice so many small moments of beauty – it gives great contentment.
And I think, in a way, that’s what nature asks of us too. Just be still and pay attention. Let it unfold. And maybe – if we do that – we’ll remember what it is to belong here.
This conversation took place on 6 May 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Connecting the dots
Is it time to stop treating wild animals as entertainment – and start defending their right to live safe, wild and free?
If creativity helps children process the world – why do we stop encouraging it so early?
Can Indigenous knowledge protect lions and livelihoods – without anyone losing out?
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