Lesley Fairfield, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, began her career in children’s illustration. Her clients included Sharon Lois and Bram, and The Travellers, TVOntario, Academic Press, Annick Press, Kids Can Press, Ginn and Company, Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada Limited, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Southam Publications Limited, University of Toronto, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Methuen Publications, Scholastic-TAB Publications Limited, Prentice-Hall Canada Inc., UNICEF Canada, Nelson Canada, Toronto Life, and the Toronto Star.

Lesley is currently working on her first graphic novel about anorexia for young adult readers called Anna's Tyranny. Lesley’s personal thirty-year struggle with anorexia and bulimia has informed her work concerning body image, which has appeared in Dance in Canada magazine, and York University’s International Women’s Studies Journal. Her interest in figurative drawing resulted in a successful exhibition of her work at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto on the subject of feminine self determination. That show brought Lesley back to her interest in drawing anorexia.

The graphic novel offers the ideal format and will be the first of its genre to explore through imagery and narrative text the complex nature of anorexia/bulimia. Anna's Tyranny is the story of a young woman who persists and eventually overcomes her anorexia. The author’s hope is that her work will provide encouragement to others involved in their own struggle and thereby overcome the persistent imperative to be thin that is so entrenched in our Western society.

“Fairfield’s pictures are witty, and a pleasure to study”
     - Books in Canada