Judith Kerr's Creatures: a celebration of her 90th birthday - in pictures

90 today: Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series of picture books is one of the UK's best-loved picture book authors, selling over 9 million books worldwide, translated into 25 languages. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

The Kerr family in 1927, six years before the family had to flee the rising Nazi party in Germany due to her writer father's liberal, anti-Hitler work. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

On the beach: a picture drawn by 13-year-old Judith Kerr during a Belgian seaside holiday the family took while living in exile from Germany in 1935. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Skating in fancy dress: Judith Kerr's drawings from 1938, by which time the family had moved to England. She writes, 'once, as a teenager talking to my father, I said that perhaps I might like to do illustration one day and he said, "You'll have to work very, because they are very good at it in this country." He was right. They are. I think I am very lucky to have joined them'. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Textile design: Victoria. In 1945, when the art schools re-opened after the war, Judith Kerr won a trade scholarship to the Central School of Arts and Crafts and was employed by a company that produced furnishing fabrics. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Textile design: Spring. 'As I knew nothing whatever about textiles, even the two days a week spent on the job were interesting at first'. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Judith Kerr met scriptwriter Tom Kneale (known professionally as Nigel Kneale and writer of The Quartermass Experiment) at the BBC and they married in 1954. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Preliminary tiger sketches for The Tiger Who Came to Tea: Judith Kerr often took her daughter Tacy to the zoo and made up a story about the tigers. It became her much-loved picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. 'It seemed simplest to base the family in the book on Tom, Tacy and myself and to give them our kitchen and I just plunged in,' she says. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Original artwork from Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who came to Tea: 'I got a lot of it wrong at the first go, so it needed redrawing, and the children caught measles, and had holidays and dentists' appointments and tea parties, so it took me the best part of a year to get to the end'. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions 1968

Original artwork from The Tiger Who Came to Tea: When Judith Kerr first met the children's books editors who would go on to publish The Tiger Who Came to Tea, 'They said they liked the book but had certain reservations. The general layout was wrong - the pictures were all squashed together ... And that business about the tiger drinking all the water in the tap... "rather unrealistic," they said, which was odd in view of the rest of the story'. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions 1968

The original Mog: Tiger was followed by Mog the Forgetful Cat. 'I determined that, like Dr Seuss, I would use a vocabulary of no more than 250 words in the book about Mog and I have done this with all my picture books since'. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Early pictures of Mog's family, based on Judith Kerr, her husband Tom Kneale and children Tacy and Matthew. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

The original cover of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is based on Judith Kerr's childhood and tells the story of a Jewish family escaping from Germany at the start of the second world war. It was followed by two other books, following the life of 'Anna' through London in the blitz and then her return to Berlin to discover the past. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013

Judith Kerr in her studio in her home in London. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

Judith Kerr and her husband Tom Kneale, who died in 2006: 'We had been together for 54 years but we had never run out of things to talk about'. After being unable to work for a year or so, Kerr completed a new picture book and then, last year, published My Henry, a funny picture book about a widow who fantasises about wild adventured with her husband in heaven. Photograph: Kerr-Kneale Productions Ltd 2013