We are delighted to welcome Mini Grey to the blog to discuss her hugely exciting and ambitious new picture book The Greatest Show On Earth.  Mini is a multi award winning author and illustrator.  Biscuit Boy won the Smarties Book Prize, Traction Man is Here won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon won the Kate Greenaway Medal.  You can find out more about Mini by visiting her website.

Please can you introduce us to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’?  

It’s the entire 4.6 billion year story of life on Earth, brought to you in the form of a performance by Rod the Roach and his insect Troupe in a Shoebox Theatre.

[See photo one in picture gallery]

What was the reaction from your agent and/or publisher to such an unusual and big book idea?

 The idea for the Greatest Show actually began around 10 years ago, and to begin with the book was small and very long! It was a little zigzag book that pulled out into a 4.6 billion year tape measure (which was on the back.) The lovely people at Penguin tried to find a way to publish it, but the zigzag format was difficult, and the little pages didn’t do justice to the story that Rod was trying to tell. For some years it drifted around, in search of the right format. And then I realised it could be a big book, rather than a little one, with space to delve into Earth’s story, and my editors Joe Marriott and Emily Lunn at Puffin decided we could make this happen!

You say the idea for ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ started with a trip to the Oxford Natural History Museum, can you explain how the idea grew?

When my son Herbie was about 5 years old, we spent a lot of time hanging out in the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Gazing at the dinosaur skeletons, I realised there were enormous gaps in my knowledge of prehistoric life, and I didn’t even know how old the Earth actually is. Well, it’s 4.6 billions years old – and I just wanted to see what all that time looked like, and hold it in my hands. Later, when Herbie was at primary school, they would do projects on the Ancient Greeks, the Egyptians; how did those timelines fit with the dinosaurs? Could it be possible to tell the whole history of Earth as a story? We humans are uniquely good at absorbing information through stories. Before writing, story was how information was passed down generations. Stories are memorable. Story makes us want to know what happens, makes us pay attention. It seizes our imaginations and curiosity.

[See Photo Two in Picture Gallery]

Could this be a first story-scaffold to hang subsequent knowledge about life on Earth upon? I think once you have a mental framework you start to collect new knowledge, and you see things that could be added to your scaffold everywhere – you see more, just in your ordinary everyday world.

[See Photo Three in Picture Gallery]

There’s a wonderful sense of drama and theatricality in the presentation of the book; how did the idea for this develop as the central conceit for the book?

I have a mild obsession with toy theatres, and at one point long ago I worked as a theatre designer. Making a picture book is a bit like making a theatre performance: – both in how you make them, but also how you perform them (every reading is a new performance). But also the theatre was the answer to how to present my story – especially the Victorian-style Pollocks toy cardboard theatre. Modelling my book page on a Victorian theatre meant that I could organise the information into areas. The main stage is where you look first, to see at a glance THE MAIN STORY. But then to be able to delve deeper in, if you want to, you can peruse the wings and also see what's going on down at the Tape Measure of Time.

[See Photo Four and Five in Picture Gallery]

How much research was involved with the book and did you have any support with that?

When I’m making picture books, sometimes I am creating artwork, and have worked out most of the story-telling and the layouts. At these times the listening-and-words part of my brain is at liberty to listen to things – in fact sometimes I really NEED to listen to things to keep on persisting at making pictures. I developed a massive thirst for all online lectures, podcasts, radio broadcasts– about things prehistoric. (In Our time on Radio 4 has brilliant prehistoric broadcasts in its archive!) So I had an overview of what my ‘scenes’ could be. I took a copy of Richard Fortey’s LIFE – An Unauthorised Biography on holiday & scribbled on it. Making the final storyboard – I had to be sure I was telling the right story. But places to find information are infinite, it wouldn’t be possible to read up everything there is to know. I ended up with a shortlist of my go-to books: about 5 books for adults, and also about three go-to children’s illustrated information books. And lots and lots of Wikipedia. At the next stage, when I thought I’d worked out what to say: a few friendly expert fact checker professors helped, and another level of Puffin in-house fact checkers. But you can never get everything right and the science changes, as we see deeper in, as it should.

Were there any facts which particularly surprised and stuck with you?

[See Photo Six in Picture Gallery]

So many! It’s amazing and terrifying that life on Earth has been REALLY close to being snuffed out (the worst: 251 MYA). How the Earth has often been a TERRIBLE place to live in the past – (possibly even trying to get rid of life, you could suspect…) There have been huge volcanic lava outpourings, there have been tremendous freezes, there have been times when the ocean became anoxic and hostile to life. There’s also just how extremely bizarre animals of even not so long ago are: for example, the chalicotherium was an unholy mammal mash-up of a horse and a gorilla – it just looks all wrong! There is the almost accidental way one animal group takes over from another after a mass extinction: mammal-relatives (therapsids) were poised to dominate Earth 270 million years ago, but it was ultimately dinosaurs who kept the mammals small and in the shadows until that fateful asteroid impact 66 million years ago. But also dizzying is the incredible recentness of humans, and the extremely nice climate we happen to find ourselves in (compared to a lot of the past), and that our happy Holocene times (the last 10,000 years), on my tape measure of time, is just the last one-tenth of the last millimetre.

[See Photo Seven in Picture Gallery]

It’s a huge and very exciting topic, do you think picture books are a useful means for explaining big and complex ideas and if so what helps with that?

The secret power of picture books – is to tell with pictures as well as words, and pictures can tell big and complex ideas. But actually they show, not tell! I hope with very visual pages, picture books can reach ‘reluctant readers’ and also children excited by prehistoric content, who have a thirst for science. I think giving children big numbers, long names, the actual facts – is something they can handle. Picture books can make things visible and tangible.

Can you tell us a bit about your technique for creating the book and the media you used?  

When I was making the pages, I was building each scene as if it was a theatre set, with actors, scenery and backdrops in layers. I’d work out the layouts with loads of layers of tracing paper cut-outs that I could move around. I’d make artwork for all my actors and scenery pieces separately, and then layer them up in Photoshop in my theatre page framework. The fun challenge was inventing what sort of puppetry Rod & Co might be using; there was quite a thrill in making insects manipulate giant puppet insects (in the Carboniferous era). I was also trying to hide jokes maybe for grown ups: eg in the Cambrian explosion page, Brunhilda (beetle) and Edna (earwig) are trying to work out which way up a creature goes: that creature is Hallucigenia. When it was discovered in the Burgess Shale, it was so odd-looking that palaeontologists couldn’t work out which appendages it walked on, and which were (maybe) for defence, and its name reflected its very mind-bending puzzlingness.

[See Photo Eight and Nine in Picture Gallery]

The tape measure is a clever way to create a time, what was involved in mapping events across such a huge span of time?

[See Photo Ten in Picture Gallery]

There were massive problems with mapping the entire 4.6 billion years. For the first 4 billion years, there’s no complex animal life. But on my scale of 1 million years to 1 centimetre, this bit would be 40 metres long – right down the street! But very luckily, after the dawning of complex animal life, about 600 million years ago, time becomes more mappable. The International Stratigraphy Chart was invaluable! I discovered a lot of geological time periods last about 50 million years. (There’s usually some sort of extinction event that differentiates the rock layers of different geological periods.) This was incredibly useful and lucky, because my open book was going to be about 50cm wide – so each spread I’d have 50 million years of timeline to play with. I had to be careful not to overload the tape measure – so that meant a lot of thought & research to work out what climate ‘story’ to tell on each spread. With the Tape Measure I was trying to show: the date/time, earth’s changing climate, earth’s changing continents, and snippets of the animals that were around at the time, and introduce the geological eras. The Time Team use cocktail stick animals and teeny road signs to mark out what’s going on.

[See Photo Eleven and Twelve in Picture Gallery]

Are there any other ideas for information topics which you’d love to approach?

How there are so many amazing animals that didn’t get to appear enough in The Greatest Show – for example: dimetrodon, therapsids, mad palaeocene mammals. What would happen if Rod and the Troupe had a time machine instead of a tape measure?

A huge thank you to Mini Grey for a fascinating interview and to Puffin Book for the opportunity.  If you have enjoyed reading about The Greatest Show on Earth, you may also be interested to attend the YLG annual conference this year, Reading the Planet follow the link for more information.

Picture Gallery:

One:           The Greatest Show on Earth
Two:           Oxford Natural History Museum
Three:        First Zig-Zag version of The Greatest Show on Earth showing the
                   Timeline.
Four:          A Pollocks Toy Theatre
Five:           This page explains how to read the book
Six:             251 million years ago – the End Permian mass extinction
Seven:       A chalicotherium – from the DK Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs
Eight:         Some of the pieces for making the Age of Fish page
Nine:          Hallucigenia
Ten:           International Chronostratagraphic Chart
Eleven:      Tape Measure research
Twelve:      Tape Measure

We are tremendously excited to welcome Thomas Harding to the blog for an interview.  Thomas is an author and journalist.  He co-funded a television station in Oxford and has worked for many years as an award-winning documentary maker.  Thomas is the author of Hanns and Rudolf, a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize.  His book, The House by the Lake a Costa Biography Award shortlistee has been adapted by him into a truly remarkable picture book showing how homes and lives span generations and the politics of their time.  The book is powerfully illustrated by Britta Teckentrup.  Do take a look at the gallery of images which Thomas has kindly shared with us.

Can you introduce yourself a little please?

As a young boy, I loved pictures books. I still have many of my favourites on my shelves. Later, as a teenager, I spent a short time working in a children’s bookshop, and it was then that I understood the diversity of picture books. When I had my own kids, I adored reading to them every night. Safe to say, I have always wanted to write my own picture book.

I have been a journalist for more than 30 years. I have written for various newspapers including the Guardian, FT, The Times and Washington Post. I have made documentaries and ran a TV station with my wife, Debora.

In 2006, my great uncle Hanns Alexander died. I knew him well, he was the person in the family who carried out pranks, who told us children dirty jokes. I knew that he and his family (including my grandmother Elsie) had fled Nazi Germany in 1936; they were Jewish. At Hanns’ funeral a eulogy was given which reported that he had tracked down and captured the Kommandant of Auschwitz. This shocked me. I had never heard this story before. How was it possible that nobody had told me? This got me going on an 8-year journey to find out the truth and resulted in my first book, Hanns and Rudolf. Ever since, I have worked as a full-time author.


The story of the house by the lake is an extraordinary one, not least because it makes us think about what a home is and means, can you tell us a bit about how you came to write it?

When I was young, my grandmother Elsie — we called her ‘Granny’ — told us about her family’s weekend lake house just outside of Berlin. She called it her ‘soul place’. Granny was a larger-than-life character, thick German accent, shock of white hair, bright red lipstick, a cigarette always on her lip. When she turned 80, she took me and my cousins back to the city of her birth. She showed us her family’s apartment in the city centre. It had been bombed during the war and was now a high-end suitcase store. She took us to the school near the Grunewald Forest where she had learnt to speak English. And then she took us out to the lake house, thirty minutes’ drive out of Berlin and to the West.

When we arrived at the lake house I was struck by how small it was. A one-level wooden structure, perhaps 9m wide and 10m long. But it had a fabulous position, overlooking the Gross Glienicke Lake. A we walked down the sandy path we were met by a tall man with a fluffy hat who asked us what we wanted. Later we would learn his name was Wolfgang Kuhne.

Granny explained that she had lived at the house in the 1920s and 1930s. Suddenly, his mood changed. ‘Come in’, he said, ‘come in!’  We then toured the house, with Herr Kuhne showing off all his improvements and my grandmother pointing out that her parents lived in this bedroom and she in that bedroom. It was a lovely, warm encounter. But it was also deeply emotional. After all, this was the last physical trace of the family in Germany. Granny was clearly pleased, however, that even though the house was no longer hers, someone was living there, taking care of it.

Twenty years later, when I was researching my book Hanns and Rudolf, I heard from a resident in the village that the house was in bad shape. I needed to come take a look. So, I hopped on a plane — easier in those days — and a few hours later was standing in front of the lake house.

The building was now overgrown with bushes and trees. The windows were broken. Inside graffiti covered the walls, the floors were strewn with broken bottles and fragments of furniture. The back bedroom, where Granny’s parents had slept, had been used a rug den. I had that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, when you see a child fall of a swing.

I went to the local city hall and asked what the plan was for the house. They said they would soon knock it down and then replace with new housing. How could I stop this? I asked. They said I would have to prove the house was culturally and historically important. This is what got me going on my research on the house, the 5 families who had lived there and the history it had seen. Which resulted in my writing the adult non-fiction book The House by the Lake.

At the same time, I started working with the residents of the village and involving members of my family. Together we agreed to save the house. Six years later, we had registered the lake house as national monument (a ‘Denkmal’ in Germany) and raised enough money to repair it back to its former state. The house was stunning! Its walls painted in mustard yellows and aqua blues and forest greens.

A few months after we opened the house to the public, I watched some young children as they walked around. I noticed their fascination with a hole in the wooden walls made by a bullet in 1945 when the Russian and German soldiers had fought house to house. I saw them touch the sunflower wallpaper and look out at in wonder the beautiful lake view. It was then that the question came into my head, could I tell this story for young readers? I was immediately excited. But I had never written a picture book before, I wasn’t sure how to do it.

As it happens, a few weeks later I bumped into Nicola Davies the author of many wonderful picture books. I told her I desperately wanted to write a book for younger readers about the house by the lake, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it. She turned to me and said ‘of course you can!’ and then added ‘just go for it’.

A few days later, I sat down at my desk and started the first draft. After a few more attempts and a few more after that, I sent it off to Walker Books, who to my great delight, said that they would like to publish the book. They then contacted the extraordinary German illustrator Britta Teckentrup, who agreed to join the project. Britta lives in Berlin and we immediately connected. It was the perfect partnership.


What type of research was entailed with the book?

I interviewed people in the village who remembered the house and the history it had witnessed. I spoke with my family of course, collecting letters, photographs, film and stories. I also went to various archives in Germany and the UK. The house itself held its own secrets, the fabric it was made from, the environment it was located in, the impact of history on its walls and floors.


Were you able to make contact with any of the families who have previously lived in the house?

Yes! Some were easier than others.

I spent weeks trying to find someone from the family who leased the land to my family. The Von Wollanks. As a last resort, I looked on Facebook, and found the great-grandson of Otto Von Wollank. He was an influencer in Berlin and his most recent picture was of him with Lady Gaga.

The Meisel family who lived at the house after my family were easier to track down. They still ran the same company ‘Meisel Music’ in Berlin. I met Doris Meisel, the daughter-in-law of Will Meisel, the man who lived at the house after my family. She handed me a plastic bag and said that she wanted me to have it. I thanked her and asked her what was inside. She said it was full of documents proving that her family had stolen the house from my family. ‘It’s important to me that you tell the story,’ she said ‘both the good and the bad.’

The Kuhne family still lives near the house. We met a few times and shared stories. Bernd Kuhne had grown up in the same room that my grandmother had used. I was struck by people and stories take place within the same walls, with the same views out of the window.

The Fuhrmanns also live nearby. When I visited the house with them they were overwhelmed with emotion. This is the strange thing about this small wooden house, it appears to provoke strong love and attachments with those it encounters.  


The picture book is an adaptation of your Costa-shortlisted biography, was it challenging adapting the book into such a short form?

When I started, I thought the biggest hurdle would be reduce a story that takes 120,000 words to tell in the adult version of the book to a few hundred for the picture book. I was wrong. The toughest challenge I realised was to locate the essence of the story. To ask the question: what are the characters’ key emotions and what is their narrative arc? This was more important than facts and dates. In truth, I found this tremendously helpful for my other non-fiction adult writing as well.


The book alludes to some dark points in human history, what was your approach to making these accessible for young readers?

This was the other major concern I had. How do you talk about the Nazis, the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, the bombing of Berlin and other dark events for young children?

Then I realised that children fall in love with places. They are sad when they have to leave them. They make friends with some and are bullied by others. They know what it is like to have something they love taken from them.

Most of all, almost everyone knows what it is like to have a home. Whether it is a tent, a flat, a house or a palace. A home is different from a building. A home is somewhere we make memories. A place we are attached to. Somewhere we leave and come back to. Have family celebrations. A place we retreat to our favorite spot, where we feel safe. Where we feel ‘at home’.

This is why I chose to put the little house by the lake, with its own personality and journey, at the centre of the story. I felt that perhaps that was a way for younger readers to connect.

And I hope the book will encourage young readers to think about what is their favourite spot, what is their ‘soul place’?

There are some very poignant explorations of barriers and borders, what kind of resonance do you feel exist with current geo-politics?

The Berlin Wall was an example of a society locking its citizens in, like a city-wide prison. This was a government trying to stop their people leaving. They were not trying to stop others coming in.

Though this is different from many other walls, the impact is similar. There is an ugly tall structure made by humans dividing one community from another.  Whether it be the Berlin Wall, or the wall along the Mexico/ USA border, or the so-called ‘peace wall’ in Jerusalem or the wall dividing the Catholic and Protestant areas in Belfast.

When I asked the people who lived in the house during the time of the Berlin Wall ‘what it was like?’, they said it was ‘normal’. They got used to it. This despite the Wall being less than 10m from the back door, with its watch towers, search lights, barking dogs, machine guns and ‘death strip’. It is a reminder that we humans can find a way to live in even the darkest of situations. Of course, this comes with a terrible cost, which those I spoke with were quick to explain.


What were your thoughts on Britta Teckentrup's illustrations?

I cried when I first saw the pictures. She has so perfectly captured the characters and the house and the story. The way the colours shift, the tone and movement. Granny would have loved these illustrations!

Can you tell us about how the house by the lake is used now?

The house by the lake has been renovated and tours and activates that take place at the house are managed by a German charity called ‘Alexander Haus’. It operates as a centre for education and reconciliation, welcoming tours from the public, schools and other institutions. We run workshops, training sessions and other similar activities. The house is open, when you are next in Berlin please come visit !


Would you be interested in writing anything else for the children and young people's market?

As it happens, I have written a book for young adults called Future History. I like to say it is a non-fiction history of the next thirty years. It has been published in Germany, will be released soon in France, we are currently looking for an English publisher. I would like to write other picture books. I have a couple of ideas… Let’s wait and see if the stars align…

Image Gallery

Image 1 book cover of The House by the Lake, by Thomas Harding illustrated by Britta Teckentrup

Images 2 and 3 Interior and Exterior of the house, 1927 photos copyright Lotte Jakobi

Photos 4 and 5 Interior and exterior of the house, 2013 photos copyright Thomas Harding

Photos 6, 7 and 8 Interior and Exterior of the house, 2019 photos copyright Andre Wagner

Photo 9 Photograph of Thomas Harding outside Alexander Haus, photo copyright Cristian Jungeblodt

Images 10, 11 and 12 spreads from The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding illustrated by Britta Teckentrup, published by Walker Studios 2020 

Massive thanks to Thomas Harding for so generously sharing his time, images and expertise through this interview.