Simmonds was named Cartoonist of the Year in the British Press Awards. In 1982 and 1983 she contributed a regular full-page strip to Harper's Magazine in America. In 1987 Simmonds turned her hand to writing, as well as illustrating, children's books. Fred, the story of a cat with a secret life, was later filmed as Famous Fred and nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and several BAFTAs. Her other children's books include Lulu and the Flying Babies, The Chocolate Wedding and Lavender. In the late 1990s Simmonds returned to the pages of The Guardian with Gemma Bovery, which reworked the story of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France. It was published as a graphic novel in 1999 and was made into a feature film of the same name (Gemma Bovery), directed by Anne Fontaine, in 2014, and starring Gemma Arterton. The Literary Life series of cartoons appeared in The Guardian'''s "Review" section on Saturdays from November 2002 until December 2004, and was published in book form in 2003 (Literary Life) and, in an expanded version, in 2017 (Literary Life Revisited). Simmond's 2005-6 Guardian series, Tamara Drewe, which echoes Thomas Hardy's novel Far From the Madding Crowd, made its début in the Review section on 17 September 2005, in the first Saturday paper after the Guardian's relaunch in the Berliner format. It ended, with episode 109 and an epilogue, on 2 December 2006 and was published as a book in 2007. In 2010 the story was adapted as a feature film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, again starring Gemma Arterton. Simmonds' third, critically acclaimed graphic novel, Cassandra Darke, was published in 2018. It is loosely based on Charles Dickens' novella A Christmas Carol; although the story unfolds in 2016-17, its eponymous protagonist is in some respects a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge, and also undergoes a profound (though more subtle and ambiguous) moral transformation. Simmonds drew the illustrations for the opening titles of the BBC's 2007 production of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, and for Midsummer Nights, a volume of opera-related short stories by prominent writers published in 2009 to mark the 75th anniversary of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2002 for services to the newspaper industry. After being nominated already in