Kemp received a bachelor's degree in mathematics with economics at the
University of Bristol in 1951. Next, she studied statistics and biology at the
University of Oxford, receiving a diploma in statistics and a degree in biology in 1953. At Oxford, she met David Kemp in the same course; they married in 1952. She became an assistant statistician at the Grassland Research Station in
Hurley, Berkshire until 1956, when she left work to start a family, eventually comprising four children. Her work at the station began her interest in discrete distributions, applied to plant species. In 1953, Kemp and her family moved to
Belfast, and the following year she began a doctoral program at
Queen's University Belfast, which she completed in 1968, continuing afterwards at Belfast as an honorary research fellow. Her doctoral dissertation was
Studies in Univariate Discrete Distribution Theory Based on the Generalized Hypergeometric Function and Associated Differential Equations. The family moved again in 1970 to
Ilkley and the
University of Bradford, where her husband became a professor of statistics and she became an honorary fellow. In 1974 she became a lecturer. She and her husband retired in 1983, and moved to
St Andrews, Scotland, where she took an honorary research position in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the
University of St Andrews. In her retirement, she continued publishing and editing as an academic statistician. It was in this time that she joined the authors of the textbook
Univariate Discrete Distributions in a 1992 second edition, in which the newly added text, equal in length to the entire first edition, was "substantially hers". She died of a long illness on 6 March 2022. ==Recognition==