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I grew up in London, in a tall Victorian terraced house. My granny lived at the top and my uncle and aunt were on the middle floor. My parents, younger sister Mary and I shared the ground floor with our cat Geoffrey.

I’ve been lucky to work with many wonderful illustrators. Here you can see pictures of the latest book by each of them, and if you click on that book you can see the books we have created together.

Julia says ... Creating this series was my favourite kind of challenge. Almost every word in every book had to be phonically decodable, and yet I wanted to write proper stories which children would enjoy reading.

This is an e-learning course on Writing Children’s Picture Books. It’s designed for adult writers, new or experienced, but should also be interesting for illustrators who want to turn their hand to writing, for teachers of children’s literature and even for schoolteachers or librarians who want to help children with their creative writing.

The result was two series of broadcasts, called “Julia Donaldson and Friends”. These went out weekly to children cooped up at home. I read some of the stories, showing pictures from the books, while others I acted out with Malcolm.

Julia says ... I had been resisting the idea of writing a sequel to The Gruffalo until I began to wonder how the Gruffalo would feel about the mouse five years later. Supposing in the Gruffalo’s mind he had become the Big Bad Mouse, to be avoided by all gruffalos big and small, what then?

As well as the stories you can find in bookshops and libraries, I’ve written a lot of books for schools. Many of these are plays, which you can find out about on the plays page of this website. Then there is a whole phonic reading scheme called Songbirds Phonics.There are 60 Songbirds books, and they’re available for classroom and also home use.

“Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler have come up with another gem… we loved it.” The Independent