The Troll

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My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes. One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published. Most children love acting and it’s a tremendous way to improve their reading.

Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. Did they instantly know, when Scheffler made the drawings for A Squash and a Squeeze almost 30 years ago, about an old woman who thinks her house is too small, that they’d found each other’s work soulmate? We have sailed past our allotted time by now but I have one last question from my three-year-old: why, at the end of A Squash and a Squeeze, does the pig look angry but the other animals don’t?

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You’ll have to ask the pig, I’m not responsible for my characters!” laughs Scheffler, and Donaldson nods: “It’s nice when children see things in the books I’m not aware of. You know they’re really looking at them.” A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood / The mouse saw the nut and the nut looked good,” Donaldson begins. The temperature outside is a furnace, but watching Donaldson perform her own classic, it’s impossible not to shiver with joy. Does she see books as a way for children to learn about the world around them, or an oasis in which they can escape from it? The Smeds and the Smoos wasn’t about Brexit, it was just Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending,” Donaldson insists. “I never start a book thinking, ‘I want to teach the world to stop being at war.’” Donaldson has in the past talked about her concerns for today’s children, from them having to wear masks in school to the effects of social media. So I persist with my theory that perhaps The Baddies is a parable about how much resilience modern kids need to deal with the world – and she persists in batting it away: “No, no, no,” she says firmly.

No, no!” cries Donaldson, while Scheffler says simultaneously “Oh that’s a good idea!” He then ponders how he might have pulled that off, Donaldson’s objections notwithstanding: “I should have drawn one of the baddies with that [Boris Johnson] hair.”

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Could you create your own set of clues to help some friends find some treasure hidden around your classroom / school? After studying drama and French at university, she busked around Europe, joined by a fellow performing enthusiast, who was, of course, Malcolm. I ask if their busking days inspired Donaldson and Scheffler’s book, Tabby McTat, about a busking cat and his shabby human, Fred. “Julia’s sister says Fred is who I’d be if I hadn’t met Julia, which I deeply resent,” Malcolm chortles. He is certainly as devoted as Fred: when Donaldson can’t remember quite when she finished writing The Baddies, Malcolm consults his diary and gives her precise start and finishing dates. Julia Donaldson is the outrageously talented, prize-winning author of the world's best-loved picture books. She was the UK Children's Laureate 2011-13 and has been honoured with a CBE for Services to Literature. Her books include The Flying Bath, Room on the Broom and the modern classic The Gruffalo, which has sold over 13.5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over sixty languages. Julia also writes fiction as well as poems, plays and songs and her brilliant live children's shows are always in demand. Julia and her husband Malcolm divide their time between Sussex and Edinburgh. Well, we don’t usually have people in our books at all,” says Donaldson, meaning that their collaborations are usually animal- (and Gruffalo) based. In The Baddies, the witch, the troll and the ghost come a cropper when a little girl refuses to be scared by them. Although it’s never mentioned in the story, she is of south Asian heritage. Is this the first time they’ve featured a non-caucasian main character?

Listen to the audiobook version of the story. Could you record your own, with music, songs and sound effects? Ocr tesseract 5.1.0-1-ge935 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9548 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000640 Openlibrary_edition When Julia’s writing, I’m like a father who is at the birth of a child. I can’t have the baby, so I’m on hand to make the tea,” Malcolm says. Look at the different types of bridges shown in the illustrations. Can you design and build a bridge that will hold a certain weight without collapsing? Scheffler found his way into art by being political. “When I was growing up in Hamburg, there was the Vietnam war going on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there are teenage drawings of mine in which I reflected on that, so that was my formation,” he says. “Oh! I didn’t know that,” says Donaldson, turning to him in surprise. “Now I draw rabbits and mice,” he says and they look at each other and laugh.Find as many different types of punctuation as you can in the story. Can you explain why the author has chosen to use them in those places? I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. It’s not difficult to see elements of Donaldson’s own story in her work. Born into a bohemian family in Hampstead, north London, she grew up in a home that she, her parents and sister shared with her grandmother, uncle and aunt. Her parents encouraged her and her sister “to absolutely be ourselves”, and Donaldson wrote musical versions of fairytales, which the four of them would perform for the extended family. To this day, she thinks of herself as a “performer-author”, and she and Malcolm frequently put on shows of her books; at the time of our interview, they are preparing for a performance at the Edinburgh festival. She always replies to children’s letters. “And they haven’t changed over the decades. It’s always the usual mix of ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ to ‘Why do you wear such funny shoes?’ I love it, because adults are probably dying to ask about my shoes but they just say, ‘Are you inspired by Tolkien?’”