Interview with Julia Donaldson

When did you decide to be a writer?

For my fifth birthday, my father gave me a very fat book called “The Book of a Thousand Poems”. I loved it. I read the poems, recited them, learnt them, and then started making up some of my own. Although I wanted to be a poet all those years ago, I later decided I would rather go on the stage. That didn’t quite work out, so I did other jobs – teaching and publishing. But somehow I’ve ended up doing what I wanted to do when I was five years old. I have a theory that this happens to quite a lot of people.

When did you start to write books?

In 1993, when one of my songs, “A Squash and a Squeeze” was made into a book. Before that I just wrote songs for children’s television.

Where do you get your ideas?

Anywhere and everywhere: things that happen to my children; memories of my own childhood; things people say; places I go to; old folk tales and fairy stories. The hard part for me is not getting the idea, it is turning it into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

How long does it take to write a book?

It can take months or years for the idea to grow in my head and for me to plan the book. This is a very important part. Then, when I am ready it could take anything between a week (for a picture book) and six months (for a chapter book) to write it. For THE GRUFFALO the ideas and planning stage lasted a year (obviously I was doing other things too!) and the actual writing took about two weeks.

Where do you write?

In my head when I’m in the bath or out for a walk. (I do have my own study, too, and sometimes I write on trains or in the library.)

Where did the inspiration for the Gruffalo come from?

The book was going to be about a tiger but I couldn’t get anything to rhyme with “tiger”. Then I thought up the lines: “Silly old Fox, doesn’t he know/There’s no such thing as a ___ ” and somehow the word “gruffalo” came to mind to fill the gap. The gruffalo looks the way he does because various things that just happened to rhyme (like toes and nose, and black and back)

Which one of your books is your favourite?

It keeps changing. At the moment I have two: “The Snail and the Whale” for younger children and “The Giants and the Joneses” for older ones.

What is your favourite book (not by you)?

One of my favourites is “Watership Down” by Richard Adams, an exciting story about rabbits.

Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson is one of the UK’s best-loved children’s authors.

By Julia Donaldson

Awards

Julia has won many awards for her books including THE GRUFFALO, which won the Smarties Prize, the Blue Peter award for “The Best Book to Read Aloud” and the Experian “Big Three” award. In 2003, Room on the Broom won both the Blue Peter award and the Sheffield Children’s Book Prize. In 2005 she won the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year for The Gruffalo’s Child