K.G. Campbell, Author/Illustrator

Keith Gordon Campbell was born in a steamy, exotic place with wildebeest and other ungainly creatures. But he was promptly packed off to spend his tender years on a damp and salty island nation in the Far North, where wild winds rattle your windows and turn one’s umbrella inside out.

In the shadow of a looming black castle, Keith was educated in an old, turreted school with ghosts and secret passages and stuff. There he learned to love all things ghoulish, ghastly and rather gothic. He wasn’t one for chasing after balls or playing leapfrog; he preferred, even then, to find quiet corners where he could write peculiar stories and illustrate them with funny characters.

Later, he attended an even older university (though with less turrets) and graduated with a Masters in art history. That,it turned out, wasn’t a terribly useful trade (in fact, it’s not a trade at all), but somehow or other (he could never quite explain how) it turned him into an interior designer — in Hollywood of all the unexpected places!

But Keith never could stop thinking up stories and pictures to go with them. They kept piling up inside him, ’til he realized that if he didn’t get them out, he would almost certainly burst. He busied himself sending manuscripts to publishers and building a portfolio of artwork, until finally somebody noticed how hard he was working and decided to make him an author. Lester’s Dreadful Sweaters is the first book written and illustrated by Keith.