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. 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? I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

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.

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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.

Here, I’ll show you,” she says standing up, and Malcolm – keen as ever – runs over to perform alongside her. In Germany, it would be unthinkable to have such incompetent, cynical and corrupt people in government Axel Scheffler Listen to the audiobook version of the story. Could you record your own, with music, songs and sound effects? 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.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? 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. 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. Could you create your own set of clues to help some friends find some treasure hidden around your classroom / school? 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.”

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 I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. 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.”

About Julia Donaldson

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?

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. The troll finds some hoof prints in the sand. Can you find out the different types of footprints created by different animals? (see Resources below) 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? When I first arrive at the Donaldsons’ house, Malcolm gives me a tour, which largely consists of him naming everyone in the family photos on the walls. “This is Jerry and Alastair, our two sons,” he says, pointing at pictures of two men. “Our oldest son Hamish died, which is terribly sad,” he says, voice catching a little. I ask Scheffler if his and his German-French family’s lives have changed much in Britain since Brexit. “Not so much on a day-to-day basis, but I look at the quality of politicians in this country and it’s incredible. In Germany, it would be unthinkable to have such incompetent, cynical and corrupt people in government. Sorry, I’m getting political,” he says.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.