Liz Evesham

My name is Liz Evesham and I have been passionate about ants all my life! In fact, I have spent nearly every moment watching, recording and teaching others about ants.

The Ant and the Wheelbarrow books were inspired by this fascination as well as a career teaching science. Ants are social creatures and work together to build their nests, collect food, and protect the colony if exposed to danger. They scurry about, picking up the offspring and other members of the colony, moving them to safer places. I continue to run annual fieldtrips that include how to locate, mark, observe and analyse data about ant colonies, their changing habitat and the effect on different colony members.

The names given to the ant characters in the books were the ones I gave the ants used in some of my research. I have written about them in academic papers and spoken about them at international conferences, so, you could say that Harry, Caroline, Annabel and Deborah are already famous!

I am dyslexic and my world is quite visual, so I wanted to incorporate illustrations to meet the needs of all kinds of learners. I was also keen to create an enjoyable series of children’s books based on facts, so that you and your children can learn about the ecology and behaviour of ants and develop a better understanding about the environment and how it affects the way living things adapt to survive.