Meeting up with Philip Ardagh at the London Book Fair was lots of fun. He has written some of the funniest and wildest tales for kids. I am a big fan of his Eddie Dickens stories as well as The Grunts. Some people are much smaller in real life than you expect. Philip is much bigger. I don’t think he was too impressed with my story plots. Here’s his take on writing stories.

“I always bore people’s pants off by telling them that I used to write before I could write – I used to fill my father’s blank diaries with squiggles – and I loved being told stories, and making up stories of my own. And I think those that have a lasting impact on people’s lives are, often, children’s books, because we read them when our brains are at their spongiest; we don’t know what’s good literature or bad literature – we just know what we like.”