Steve Bell was born in 1951 in Walthamstow in East London. His original strip cartoon, Maggie's Farm, appeared in Time Out and City Limits magazines from 1979 until 1987 and, since 1981 he has written and drawn the daily If... strip in the Guardian. In addition, since 1990 he has produced four large free-standing cartoons a week on the leader pages. He has won numerous awards, including the Political Cartoon Society Cartoon of the Year Award in 2001 and 2008, Cartoonist of the Year in 2005 and 2007, the British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year in 2002, and the Cartoon Arts Trust Award eight times. His work has been published and exhibited all over the world, and he has had several retrospective exhibitions of his artwork across the UK. He is a trustee of the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury, which opened to the public in February 2006. He is married with four grown up children and lives in Brighton.