The Children’s Book Award is the only national award for children’s books that is voted for entirely by children. It is owned and coordinated by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups and is highly respected by teachers, parents and librarians. It has brought acclaim and strong sales to past winners such as J.K. Rowling, Patrick Ness, Andy Stanton, Malorie Blackman, Anthony Horowitz and Michael Morpurgo, who has won a record four times. The award has often been the first to recognise the future stars of children’s fiction and has the ability to turn popular authors into bestsellers.
The idea for my book ‘A Wild Walk to School’ came from our real life walk to school every day with our two daughters. I love the way that they can create games out of everything - if they see fallen leaves, or a low wall to climb along, or a bump in the road then they pretend it is lava to jump over, or a tightrope to walk across or a sleeping giant’s tummy to tiptoe around so that they don’t wake the giant. As we walk, they get lost in these elaborate and imaginative adventures but they are completely oblivious to my worry about the time pressure not to be late getting there. I’m always fascinated in the way that children view the world in comparison to adults and our daily school walks seemed like a perfect example of this juxtaposition, where my priorities are very different to my children’s. I thought it would make a funny book if I could show both points of view of this journey, which is an epic adventure full of excitement and peril for the children, while the mum is unfazed by the erupting volcano, huge precipice or sleeping giant and is more worried that their uniform might get dirty and that they might be late for school.
But then I thought it would be a funny surprise if at the end of the book the mum has been inspired by the children and has her own imaginative adventure. You get a little hint that she might be thinking about this on the penultimate page if you look at the puddles and see that she is reflected in the water with the rainbow of the umbrella following along behind her.
I created the illustrations for the book on watercolour paper using ink, watercolour paint, gouache paint, drawing pencils and coloured pencils. I like to use a mixture of materials like this because it creates all different kinds of mark making in the pictures.
I often include real things from our home in my illustrations and the bedroom in this book is a bit similar to our daughters’ bedroom with the same bunk beds and some of their actual toys on the floor. There is also a drawing of their pet guinea pigs on the wall. While I was working this book we were in the process of knocking our kitchen down so that we could re-build it, so I chose to draw our old kitchen in the story as a way of preserving it because it doesn’t exist any more.
I like including something in the pictures to spot on every page so I gave the girls in the story a little black and white cat who follows them to school. This cat is inspired by my own childhood cat who would always walk along with me to the end of the road whenever I went somewhere.
Also, I really love volcanoes so one of the things that I was
most excited about making this book was that it gave me a great excuse to
include a volcano and I had a lot of fun painting that page!
Children across the UK are encouraged to get involved. Copies of the books can be purchased at a discount from our partner supplier Heath Books here [link https://www.heathbooks.co.uk/
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