We are delighted to welcome author and illustrator Debi Gliori to the blog to introduce her new picturebook A Cat Called Waverley.  Debi studied illustration at Edinburgh College of Art and has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Strathclyde University.  Debi has won the Red House Children’s Book Award and has twice been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal.  Debi will be talking more about the highly affecting and important picturebook A Cat Called Waverley at the Youth Libraries Group annual conference this year – Representations of Place: New Lands and New Ways of Looking.

Some years ago, I visited a library in Glasgow to lead a storytelling session with an invited primary school class. Before the children arrived, the librarian showed me to the staffroom to drop my bags, and apologised in advance for the smell which, she said, was particularly noticeable in the ladies’ bathroom. She explained that in the colder parts of the year, the library was much prized by the local homeless population. She tilted her head to indicate where a few people sat slumped in forgotten corners of the library, dozing behind newspapers in the quiet warmth of the reading room. The librarian added in a whisper, they sleep here all day, waiting for their laundry to dry. Seeing my puzzled expression, the librarian continued; they wash their underclothes in the bathroom sinks, then drape them across the large Victorian radiators to dry. Imagine.

Indeed. Imagine that your life underwent an unforeseen and catastrophic shift. Imagine having to rely on the kindness of strangers for your survival. Imagine being blamed or shamed for allowing such a fate to befall you. Imagine having no agency, no voice, no vote and no sanctuary for when the winter comes. Back then, all those years ago in Glasgow, I chose not to imagine how appalling such a life would be. I had children to raise, books to write and, heavens, a class of seven-year-olds trooping into the library, wrinkling up their noses and loudly complaining about the smell.

Many years later, in an older and hopefully more empathetic version of myself, I met the human subject of my book A Cat Called Waverley; a homeless war veteran called Darren Greenfield. In my desire to devise a way to help him off the streets of Edinburgh without turning him into the subject of some well-intentioned children’s writer’s charity, I wove Darren’s life into a fictional tale of a war veteran and his faithful cat, Waverley. I hoped not only to highlight how easy it is to fall into homelessness, but also to begin a conversation with children, to shed light on this grotesque state of affairs that wilfully allows our fellow-humans to live without shelter on the streets of our cities. I also wanted to say to Darren - you matter. Your life story matters. It is wrong and unjust that you live on the streets while we live in houses, and hopefully this book will help ensure that such inequality becomes a thing of the past.

For many of us, the main point of contact we have with our homeless fellow-citizens is when we see them asking passing strangers for money on the streets of towns and cities around the UK. Or, when leafing through the broadsheet press, we encounter an advert exhorting us to give generously to one of the charities set up to support homeless people. Sadly, when most of us hear the word ‘homeless’ it doesn’t prompt a surge of empathy or engender more than the faintest wisp of fellow-feeling. Most of us have no direct experience of what it means to have nowhere to call ‘home’.

Whether this lack of empathy is a failure of imagination or a deliberate turning away is immaterial; it results in the same thing. We place a few coins in the outstretched hand and walk on by. We take a deep breath and turn the page. We blank out this unpleasant part of the reality of 21stC life. Moreover, we continue to vote for political parties that not only allow our fellow humans to live on the streets, but whose policies appear to actively encourage a moral climate where homelessness is commonplace. We are encouraged to demonise the unfortunate, to categorise people into strivers and shirkers and thus avoid any responsibility for our common weal. It’s an all-too common story, our collective blindness to inequalities and our morally deficient reluctance to step in to rewrite this potentially disastrous story arc.

Darren Greenfield’s story ended on the streets of Edinburgh. After several years he slipped through the inadequate net of social provisions we extend to our homeless fellow-humans. The news cycle paid brief attention. One more homeless person died on the streets of a first world city. Next?

With the ability to turn the world around me into a story, I’d managed to make over seventy books without once touching on the subject of homelessness. Until Darren. Mainly, I suspect, because I correctly guessed that such a book might not only be difficult to conceive and illustrate, but also that it could be tricky to find a publisher for such a project. I am delighted that not only did A Cat Called Waverley find an empathetic and principled publisher, but it also found the best home imaginable with Otter-Barry Books. Some stories do have a happy ending.

A big thank you to Debi Gliori for the blog and to Otter-Barry Books for the opportunity.

We are excited to welcome Alison Brumwell, Chair of the Youth Libraries Group, to reflect on the work of illustrator Jon Agee, whose The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau publishes today (4 February 2021).  

One of my personal highlights of In the Frame: Putting Readers in the Picture, YLG’s virtual conference in November 2020, was the opportunity to host a live Q & A session with acclaimed U.S. author and illustrator Jon Agee from his home base in San Francisco. While I have admired Jon’s work for several years - and he has won several awards during his substantial career - he has been less well-known in the UK until recently, courtesy of independent publisher Scallywag Press.

Scallywag Press, founded in 2018 by Sarah Pakenham, has introduced five of Jon Agee’s works to UK readers, including the publication of The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau. This witty, inventive picture book was originally published in 1988 and was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Children’s Book of the Year. It features Jon’s trademark visual humour and word play, with the reader definitely privy to the joke and able to fully interact with the narrative. As Sarah says, “[Jon’s] is masterful storytelling with very simple words and pictures, full of the surreal, the hilarious and the poignant.”

I first encountered the magic and artistry of Jon Agee at Mabel’s Fables, an independent bookseller in Toronto, and was immediately hooked by his humour, sense of the absurd and impeccable visual timing. Art has always been a central part of Jon’s life; as a young student he loved drawing cartoons and comic strips and was heavily influenced by the English illustrator and poet Edward Lear. This passion is clearly evident in his books for children. He has an ability to convey emotion and cleverly pace his stories through drawing clear, bold lines. There’s also a very clever use of comic book layout (the panels, spotlight effect and speech bubbles in Lion Lessons are one example of this). 

Sarah’s own relationship with Jon’s books began when she met Charlene Lai, a Taiwanese bookseller and blogger, who had invited Jon to the Taipei BookFair. After investigating them all, Sarah says “each was more of a delight than the last!” As only two of Jon’s picture books had ever been published in the UK (coincidentally by Sarah’s editor, Janice Thompson, who was Children’s Book Editor at Faber in the 1980’s) she soon acquired the rights to Lion Lessons and made an offer on The Wall in the Middle of the Book on the basis of a half-finished book. In the latter, there is an inventive exploration of the fourth wall – the space which separates Jon’s characters from their reader – and a strong sense of the three-dimensional, which is what also makes Felix Clousseau such a timeless, remarkable picture book. The reader is in the front row of the audience, watching the narrative unfold and experiencing a thoroughly satisfying (if unexpected) ending. A twist to the tale is something at which Jon Agee excels!

Prior to interviewing Jon last year, I re-read American writer Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions, in which he describes one of his character’s silent film performances: “It wasn’t slapstick and anarchy so much as character and pace, a smoothly orchestrated mixture of objects, bodies and minds.” The same could be said of Jon Agee, which is what makes him such a remarkable writer and illustrator. His illustrated narratives are entertaining, nuanced and perfectly balanced, with a visual challenge in every spread.

Thank you to Alison Brumwell for the blog.  Why not check out the YLG interview with Jon Agee here?

We are delighted and extremely excited to welcome Shirley Hughes to the blog.  Shirley was the winner of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger.  This also won the Greenaway of Greenaways during the award’s anniversary celebrations.  To celebrate the publication of the book’s sequel Dogger’s Christmas, we were delighted to have the opportunity to interview Shirley Hughes.

As well as being a hugely talented, multi-award winning author-illustrator, Shirley is also a great friend and champion of libraries.  She was selected as a guest editor for BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour and specifically asked for one of the topics during her show to be ‘Libraries’.  2020 marks the 60^th anniversary of Shirley Hughes’ first published book, Lucy and Tom’s Day.  To escape into or just enjoy a different one of Shirley’s remarkable books, follow her on Twitter @ShirleyHughes_

Please can you tell us how you first began working in illustration?

Aged 17 I studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, my favourite part of the course was fashion drawing. After just over a year I moved on to the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. There was no design or illustration tuition at the Ruskin, a tutor called Jack Townend taught lithography. It was he who suggested I might like to try some book illustration. In my final year in Oxford I concentrated on graphic work, using pen and ink, watercolour and gouache. I made a tiny amount of cash drawing adverts of ladies’ underwear for a department store on the High Street. Meanwhile I took my first job hand colouring line illustrations in an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As I graduated Barnet Freedman, a revered illustrator, tutor, war artist and commercial artist, told me he’d consider introducing me to some publishers in London if I was serious about trying to make my way as an illustrator. This he kindly did. My first commission for a book came with a story by Olivia Fitz Roy, The Hill War and this gradually led to more work until in 1960 my first picture book was published, Lucy and Tom’s Day (Victor Gollancz).

There’s a deceptive simplicity in the way your work ‘shows’ stories unfolding and character’s emotions and motivations progressing.  In your view, what makes for a successful way of showing a story through illustration?

The text must leave space for the illustrations in two ways; firstly, physical space so that you consider where the text will be placed as you create your illustrations, but then also more loosely. The words can convey one story, whilst the drawings show something slightly different. You want to give the reader and the child things to talk about, so the child can be spotting something the illustrations reveal but the text doesn’t, that way the child is ahead of the adult.

Dogger won the Kate Greenaway Medal and in 2007 went on to be voted as the Greenaway of Greenaways by the public, what kind of impact did this recognition have on your career?

Winning the Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger meant so very much to me. To have my work recognised by esteemed librarians was quite something. So many distinguished illustrators, whose work I so admire, had won the medal before me. The award almost coincided with my entry into the USA, and Dogger’s ongoing success led to more of my books being published there and internationally. I will never know if the Medal had any sway over the American publisher, I am pretty sure it did. It gave me such a fillip; it was a boost to my creativity and gave me a true incentive to keep going.

To be voted the Greenaway of Greenaways was an enormous honour, and I am very grateful to all those who have shared the story at home, in schools and in libraries and who came out to vote for me and Dogger. It's hugely rewarding to have created books that receive the ultimate recognition like this. Thank you.

As well as creating your own books, you’ve collaborated with some incredible names in children’s literature, Noel Streatfeild, Dorothy Edwards, Margaret Mahy… what would you say are the differences between illustrating another’s person’s text and your own and do you have a preference?

I sometimes think of my time spent illustrating authors’ work as an apprenticeship. Often I’d be asked to create a cover and say twenty line drawings. This kind of apprenticeship is so hard to come by nowadays for emerging illustrators. When it comes to visual characterisation an illustrator is best left to their own imagination, with the less interjections from the author the better really once you get going. The sparser the text the more my imagination reins free. It is slightly uncanny when you find out later that you have drawn somebody who looks like the author, or one of their relatives…

When I look back I think my biggest break of all came from working with Dorothy Edwards. I was very familiar with her My Naughty Little Sister stories; I’d read them bedtime after bedtime to my own children. However tired I was, Dorothy’s books were always a pleasure to read.  Dorothy’s first collections of stories were originally illustrated by three different artists. In 1968 I was commissioned by Methuen to illustrate When My Naughty Little Sister Was Good, and Dorothy was so pleased with how they looked that she asked that I re-illustrate all of her stories.  When the two of us finally met there was an immediate rapport. She told me numerous tales of her own childhood. She, of course, was the Naughty Little Sister. I learned a very great deal from Dorothy, not least how to address and entertain a young audience.

I had almost no contact with Margaret Mahy. I was in London and she was in New Zealand. But vivid pictures flow from her descriptions and every sentence she wrote.

I was fortunate to be asked to work with Noel Streatfeild, then at the height of her powers. She had spotted one of my illustrations, and asked her publisher Collins, if I might work on her new book The Bell Family.

It was such fun to work with my daughter, the author illustrator Clara Vulliamy, for our Dixie O’Day series. We dreamt up the stories about two chums Dixie and Percy and their adventures behind the wheel. For the first time in my life I handed over the reins for the illustrations and Clara did the drawings, with me writing the stories. With Dixie O'Day I was especially thinking about the emergent reader who enjoyed picture books but was moving into the challenge of longer text, and needs a lot of inspiration from illustrations to carry them along.

The return to Dave, Dogger and family feels so natural and seamless.  The book is an absolute classic, how did it feel to be returning to these characters and were there any challenges given how well loved Dogger is?

I’d been wanting to do another Christmas story, but it took a while for the right idea to form in my head. I thought and thought, and mulled and mulled, and then Dogger’s Christmas took flight. The simplicity of a picture book is misleading: they can take a long time to come together. The real Dogger is so vivid in my imagination I could draw him in my sleep now. It has been like meeting up again with a very old friend.

You’ve worked across so many different age-groups (from nursery upwards) and across a huge variety of forms – picture books, short stories, poetry, graphic novels.  Do you have a preferred age-group or form and do you consciously seek to challenge yourself?

My favourite audience has to be the child on the cusp of or just embarked upon school, who’s just beginning to get excited about books.

Through my career I feel I have taken on several challenges. I took on a new one in Enchantment in the Garden. I wanted to create a longer story, which might appeal to boys as well as girls, but wanted to combine text, line drawing and colour art work. I used a panel to the side of the page for the text which then left me plenty of space to explore with my colour illustrations. I used this format again with The Lion and the Unicorn, and Ella’s Big Chance. I suppose with these books I was recalling those illustrators like Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham, whose gift books I had so enjoyed in my own childhood. I turned to longer fiction, firstly with Hero on a Bicycle and then Whistling in the Dark, following my husband’s death. I wrote at the weekends and filled my time with those longer stories whilst I worked on my colour books in the week.

On the subject of challenge, you won a second Kate Greenaway medal with Ella’s Big Chance a jazz inspired reimagining of Cinderella, how much research was involved with creating such an immersive period piece?

I wanted to set the book, with all of its dancing scenes, ballrooms and splendour, in the 1920s when dancing was coming into vogue, with dancers shimmying about, with the quick step, the two step, the Charleston. I learned so much about how fabric drapes, how it covers and moves with the figure from my time at Liverpool Art School. We studied the history of costume there too, so useful when it came to illustrating my fairy tale retelling Ella’s Big Chance. The dresses are all my designs, inspired by the great French couturiers of the 1920s such as Doucet, Poiret and Patou; and the ballroom scenes inspired by the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies.

Please can you talk us through your approach to creating a book?

I draw out my books first in rough, taking the story from double-page spread to spread. One of the toughest challenges is then to translate the vitality of the rough, which is done at great speed with a B pencil, into the finished artwork, which, of course is done at a much slower and more meticulous pace. There is nothing more exciting than starting work; sharpening pencils and squeezing out my paints on to the palette. I use gouache colour, which is water-based but has a lot more body than watercolour, so you can cover up mistakes. I begin with Vandyke Brown, getting the details in place and the figures established – paying particular attention to gestures and expressions, which carry so much of the story – before adding local colour. I sometimes use oil pastels too, especially for landscapes and skies where I can be more free and impressionistic.

Which books and artists do you admire and how have these influenced your work?

I feel I have learned from so many greats to have gone before me. If I had to choose just one, it would be Edward Ardizzone. An author, illustrator and distinguished war artist, remarkably he was almost entirely self-taught. His figures, so touching in back view, are instantly recognisable. He had a perfect sense of tone, and with a few scratched lines could tell you exactly what he wanted you to see.

Thinking of contemporary artists, I greatly admire Posy Simmonds for her humour and her line work, Raymond Briggs who is a simply wonderful artist, Anthony Browne and Chris Riddell for his political cartoons.

Family is hugely important in your books, what do your own think of your work and do they have any particular favourites among your books?

My own family are my most loyal readers – it’s very important to me to have their good opinion of my books. Ed is drawn to my longer stories, such as Enchantment in the Garden and The Lion and the Unicorn. Tom has a soft spot for The Nursery Collection, published by Walker Books (Bathwater’s Hot, Colours, Noisy among others), as they remind him of when his own children were small. Clara, because she is an author illustrator too, always says that her favourite is the one on my drawing board at any given time – I show her my works in progress and we bounce ideas around, which is a huge pleasure.

Shirley Hughes, November 2020.


A huge thank you to Shirley Hughes for her generosity in sharing so much of her time and expertise with this interview and to Clare Hall-Craggs for the opportunity.

It is an honour to welcome much loved illustrator Ruth Brown to the blog and to talk with her about creative, cats and her craft.  Ruth's books have been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Kate Greenaway medal.  Ruth is the author of many favourite picture books including A Dark, Dark Tale, Gracie the lighthouse cat and The Tale of Two Mice.  Ruth's latest book is A Gallery of Cats an exploration of the world of art.

Some of your childhood was spent in Germany immediately after the war, do you feel this has influenced your work?

I think my work is more influenced by the time before we went to live in Germany after the war. In 1941, my mum and sister moved from the south coast of England to a small cottage in rural Devon, shared with my Granny, my aunt and 2 cousins. I was born there in the May and we lived there until I was 5. We didnʼt have many books, just the usual annuals, but we did have Robert Louis Stevensonʼs “Treasure Island. It was our favourite bedtime story and mum and aunt Nell just read it on a loop, usually in the cousins bedroom. When I was old enough to join in, I was almost too frightened to listen - especially the Blind Pew bit - yet too frightened to go to bed in the other room on my own. Itʼs still my all time favourite book. I remember how it felt to be really small, with things towering above me - inside the tiny cottage and in the fields around. The older kids had the freedom to roam wherever, but the garden was my world, and the allotments next door owned by our neighbour old Mr. England. He dug up big, fat, pink worms and held them, squirming, in his huge hands for me to examine. We chatted ( well I did mostly) and every morning he brought me a new laid egg which he produced, miraculously, from under his cap! In return I made him mud pies decorated with coloured chalk mixed with water which he pretended to eat. So, yes, those first five years of being surrounded by all things country have had the most influence on my books. The contrast between my life in rural Devon and my life in post war Germany, from 1947 until 1953, showed me what it was like to be a foreigner. Strangely, when we returned to England I again felt like, and was treated as, a foreigner when I started a “third life” at a strict girls grammar school. But I did find a home - the Art room.

Your first published book was Crazy Charlie (1979), can you tell us a little about how you came to illustration and this book?

I trained as an illustrator at Bournemouth and Birmingham Colleges of Art and then the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1964 I got married and a year later had our first child.....great career move! So I started to work as a freelance, mostly for the BBC childrenʼs programmes. In those days they commissioned original artwork for programmes such as Jackanory and Play School as well as many schools programmes. After I had my second child I began to think more about childrenʼs books because of reading to them - especially at bedtime. I found it really difficult to find a book to interest (a) a child who could read, (b) a toddler who couldnʼt read but needed interesting pictures and (c) a mother trying not to nod off after a long day. So, one day, when the image of a crocodile with false teeth came into my head I worked it up into a story. A great friend of mine was the late wonderful Pat Hutchins who kindly introduced me to her publishers at Bodley Head. Although they liked it, they decided it was not for them but they knew of a publisher who had recently started his own list and recommended me to him.....Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press. Iʼve been with him ever since.

You have written many books featuring cats, including your latest, A Gallery of Cats.  What appeals to you about cats?

Although in Gallery of Cats I used my grandson Tom, in most of my books I use animals to tell the story. I particularly like mice, not in my house, of course, but they are good to draw and can be anthropomorphised without sentimentality e.g. my illustrations for The Christmas Mouse  in which Toby Forward cleverly mirrored Dickensʼ Christmas Carol via the mice under the floorboards and my Tale of Two Mice involving mice and a cat, another favourite subject. Several of my books are straight forward true stories of my own cats such as Our Cat Flossie, Copycat and Holly. Lots of children own cats so they can straightforwardly relate to the stories. But the cat in Dark, Dark Tale is of secondary importance and is merely a device to lure the reader all the way through from the moor to the mouse. Gracie, the Lighthouse Cat mirrors the story of Grace Darling. Children will relate to the plight of the cat and then, hopefully, be curious about the background story.

A Gallery of Cats is based around Tom who visits a gallery and encounters all manner of pictures created by cats.  How much research was needed to create each picture and did this require adopting different techniques?

A Gallery of Cats took a while to evolve. It started with the picture of Samuel. I wanted to pay homage to one of my favourite artists, Samuel Palmer, by painting an image in his style. I needed a subject so I chose a cat. I enjoyed doing it so much that I carried the idea forward, still using the cat theme, to pay homage to other artists that I admire. The artists I chose all had very recognisable ways of working e.g. Van Gogh used thick oil paint, Klimt used gold leaf, Escher etched, but I just used the medium that I always use, acrylics, to mimic the media they used. Except for the Samuel Palmer - I also used pen and ink, just to see if I could.

You also draw parallels between some of the cat creators and the artists – Frida Kahlo’s accent is implied and Vincent enjoys chasing crows around the field – was it important to ensure that the text as well as the pictures referred to the artists?

It was important that the text not only related to the breed and temperament of each cat but also gave some clues to the lives of the painters. I want the readerʼs curiosity to be aroused so that they will go on and find things for themselves. For instance.... Why does René the cat not like water? Magritteʼs mother drowned. Why is Henri the cat a breed called a munchkin? Because they are bred to have very short legs and Toulouse Lautrec had short legs due to a childhood accident. I strive to make my books work on as many levels as possible, so I was also delighted that the designer was able to reduce the the text that Tom is supposedly reading aloud and put it in tiny, proportionally accurate, labels next to the pictures. Think what fun it is for a child to discover that by using a magnifying glass you can read exactly the same text as the in the big type!

How important is it for children to have an understanding of the work of great artists?

The first books that children see are picture books so they are the first introduction to the amazing world of literature AND art. The writing and images in those books should be as good as they can possibly be. Illustration is often seen as the poor relation of fine art, but there were, and still are, brilliant artists who work with print for children - think of Arthur Rackham or Maurice Sendak or N.C. Wyeth ( who incidentally did the definitive version of Treasure Island).Just because their work is in a book and not hanging on a wall doesnʼt mean it isnʼt great art. Admittedly there are an awful lot of terrible books published too and unfortunately some people think that anyone can write or illustrate for children, itʼs sometimes regarded as a sort of hobby. In fact I have been asked several times if Iʼve ever thought of doing a “real/proper book”.......my reply( in my head )is not printable. I cannot comment on the focus on art in schools - teachers are under enormous pressure from all sides and it probably comes down to the methods of individual teachers. But my aim in the books that I publish is to provide enough stimulus for a teacher to get some interesting work out of the children, be it drawings or writing or natural science etc. I like hope my books make children curious.

You’ve created illustrated editions of stories like Eleanor Atkinson’s Greyfriar’s Bobby and Anne Sewell’s Black Beauty, are there any other books you’d like to illustrate?

Greyfriars Bobby was a true story, deeply moving , about the little dog that lived by his masters grave for many years. I later read that terriers can smell bones several feet below ground.........even I didnʼt think that was suitable to put in the book! There have been many written versions of the story but I hadnʼt seen a full colour one. The same reason applied to Black Beauty. Sometimes itʼs good to produce your own take on a story already in the public domain. For a long time I have wanted to do a picture book of Walter de la Mareʼs poem Five Eyes but we shall see.

Could you talk us through your technique for creating a picture book?

Ideas are really peculiar. Sometimes they arrive fully formed in my head and sometimes itʼs bit by bit and they have to merge and cook. I donʼt commit anything to paper until itʼs all there in my head and then I work on the text first. It doesnʼt have to be perfect, just the bare bones will do. In the craziest book there has to be a sort of mad logic. Most books have about 12 double page spreads so the text has to divide as naturally as possible. Then I work out all the pictures, chronologically, on tracing paper......much too frightening to start the real thing straight away.....where I make all my mistakes. I prepare my surface, I use acrylic paints and inks on a gesso primer, and then stare out of the window or clean my brushes.....all the usual displacement activities. I transfer my drawings and begin to redraw usually with a charcoal pencil and then I paint and then itʼs alright and time flies. I always do the cover last - by then I have painted into my comfort zone and I know the book. 

Ten Seeds and A Dark, Dark Tale both feel real classics of the picture book form, what in your opinion makes the ideal text for a picture book?

The ideal text for a picture book acts as a counterpoint to the pictures. They should have the same weight and balance and each do what the other canʼt. In Dark,Dark,Tale I make no reference to the cat - the cat is doing its own job leading you to the mouse. In Ten Seeds the text doesnʼt say how the seeds are diminishing, the pictures do that. I also refer to my answer to question 2 - I remember vividly trying to stay awake while reading the most long-winded bedtime stories to my children, so I am forever on the side of the reader, adult as well as child. But if I only have 10 words on a page, every single one has to work really well and justify its place there.

You’ve illustrated a number of fairly frightening books for children, how do you make fear suspenseful but balance this against making it terrifying?

Again I refer back to a previous answer - there was nothing quite so terrifying or exciting as sitting in the safety of a candle-lit bedroom with my family and listening to the adventures of Jim Hawkins on his treasure island adventures. Children call A Dark, Dark Tale a scary book but I explain that the thing that makes them think so is their own imagining of being in an empty house all alone. Nothing scary actually happens but I harness the power of the readers own imaging of their own worst fears, far more frightening to you than mine would be. My childhood nightmare was the thought that I might wake up in the night and find that I was the only person left in the world. My mother died - always traumatic however old you are - just before I started the book and in a way, part of my nightmare had come true so maybe thatʼs why it resonates. I also tell children that the only frightened thing in the book is the mouse who is terrified of you clumping up the stairs etc etc. The fear is reversed. I do enjoy reading it to children though, because in the brightest of neon-lit classrooms you can still create an atmosphere and always make them jump at the end. What fun!

Thank you to Ruth Brown for her fascinating and insightful interview and to Scallwayg Press for the opportunity.

The Youth Libraries Group are excited not only to feature on Thiago de Moraes's blog tour, but to be the first stop on this.  Thiago has written a compelling feature onf how 'it's easier to write for kids if you haven't stopped thinking like one.'

When I began writing A Mummy Ate my Homework I didn’t know it would end up being the first in a series of books about an 11-year old boy, neither did I deliberately aim it at an audience of kids around that age. Like a lot of authors, I started writing a story and it turned out to be the way that it is.

It was immensely fun to write, mostly because everyone involved understood the type of humour I was attempting to create. They were trusting enough to believe it would work and very generous with their effort to make it work. That sounds obvious, but not everyone in publishing would have such faith in the mind and heart of an 11 year old reader (or writer, in this particular case) to go along with all that ended up in this book.

11 is a funny age. You know enough to understand stuff, but not so much that you look at the world too objectively. Everything still has the potential to be wonderful and slightly baffling. Although I’m not a child by any valid statistic (in Middle Age Britain I’d be some sort of crumbling village elder or, more likely, a corpse), I haven’t been able to abandon the state of mind of an 11-year old since, well… since I was 11.

I am still fascinated by all sorts of things, all of the time. Creatures I can see in the grass, the way someone stands in a queue, the wingspan of the Andean condor, the ways the sausages on the left side of our oven burn quicker than the ones on the right... I regularly wake my wife up at night to tell her some random and (I am told) totally useless fact I just read but didn’t understand particularly well. Last week it was something on the domestication of horses during the late Neolithic. Lucky lady.

Looking at everything with some sense of wonder also means you’re bound to find most things funny. When writing as Henry I have tried to see the world as he sees it (which is inevitably not that far from the way I do), and the ancient Egyptian world is already full of strangeness and wonder to anyone living today. But because Henry is Henry, and not anybody else, the things he finds odd, moving, difficult or funny might not be the things most of us would.

Here’s what’s going through his mind right at the beginning of the story, while he is trying to figure out where (and when) he landed after his time travel mishap (see attached illustration!)

Some of my favourite books as a child were Asterix and Le Petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas in English), both written by Albert Goscinny. They are still some of my favourite books, and I suspect that’s because they’re not trying to be funny or interesting just for people who are a certain age, or who live in a specific place, time, etc. They just aim to be funny and interesting for everyone (and have been extraordinarily successful at that). Their universality doesn’t come from careful tailoring, but from finding the common things that all of us can enjoy in moments that might seem, superficially, to be very individual.

These common things, the stuff that really matters, don’t change whether you’re eight or eighty. Kids are intelligent, incredibly resourceful intellectually and have an amazing ability to fill the gaps when they don’t understand something immediately. They’re also quick and unforgiving when it comes to spotting things that don’t make sense or aren’t funny enough. Respecting their sensibility and abilities and not seeing their age as a limitation will always leads to better, more interesting stuff.

That’s it. I’m off to play some Minecraft now.

A huge thank you to Thiago de Moraes for the blog feature and to Scholastic for including us on the tour!