Over 25 years, Anna Wilson has written everything from picture books to poetry, chapter books for children and a memoir for adults. As such an accomplished writer it is hardly surprising that her good friend, the late Michael Bond, agreed to Anna writing Paddington when he fell unwell.
In this interview, Anna tells us all about her writing inspirations, Paddington in Peru, future projects and much more!
1. At Spy Readers, we have read thousands of books and Grandpa and the Kingfisher is one of our favourite picture books. What inspired you to write this book?
Grandpa and the Kingfisher was written 9 years ago. (Yes, it can take that long to get a picture book published!) I am glad you like it! I wrote it in the aftermath of losing my dear dad, Martin (which happens to be another word for kingfisher). He had an especially vicious form of cancer which he battled while also trying to care for my poor mum who was suffering from severe mental illness and who died not long after Dad did. I was heavy with grief during this time, and, as always, the thing that saved me from going under in the end was writing – writing about grief and loss and the memories of the people I had lost. This little picture book, beautifully illustrated by Sarah Massini, is therefore about my dad who loved the river and was determined, right up to the end, to get back into his boat. He also loved the kingfishers that lived by the river Medway near our home in Kent. I wrote the book in memory of him in the hope that it will help others to talk to their children about the circle of life in a positive and non-threatening way.
2. Do you use a lot of personal experiences to inspire your writing for children?
I always have. My first series, Nina Fairy Ballerina, was inspired by my daughter and her friends. They were always falling in and out of friendships and having little dramas, so I borrowed quite a lot from them! Monkey Business was entirely inspired by my son’s animal obsession and his desire to have his own zoo in our garden. He and his best friend would talk about it incessantly, so I started taking notes! I loved listening to the kids sitting in the back of the car while I was driving them around – I sort of became invisible to them, but all the time I was taking mental notes. Summer’s Shadow was inspired by the house in which I now live in Cornwall which is haunted… My picture books have all been inspired by family members and my connection with the natural world. My latest, Be Back Soon, illustrated by Jenny Bloomfield, came from the letters my aunt used to write me from South Africa telling me that the swallows had arrived from the UK and that she’d look after them until they were ready to fly back to me. It was our way of staying in touch. It made me think about human migration and how we can still be connected even if we live thousands of miles apart.
3. Is there a message for children in your series of books about Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire? He seems to really lack in self-confidence but so much of this is caused by his mother’s treatment of him.
Poor little Vlad! Yes, he really does lack self-confidence. I wrote these when I was feeling much the same. Mum and Dad were sick and I wasn’t sure that I could “write funny” any more. I was struggling with a lot of things from my own childhood and had started psychotherapy. It wasn’t until I was writing the fourth book that I realised that Vlad was me and that his mum was (a bit!) like my mum. (Also that Mulch was my therapist – I shared this with her and she agreed!) I loved my mum very much but she was strict and I never felt I was good enough or that I lived up to her ambitions for me. I know she didn’t mean me to feel like this – it was actually how she felt about herself. She was a very clever woman who was the first in her family to go to university and she always felt she didn’t live up to her potential. I was also a bit of a loner at school like Vlad and for a long time I had only one very close friend. I spent a lot of time in my head, making up stories and reading a lot like Vlad does. I didn’t really understand group dynamics and was not one of the cool kids!
I also think Vlad’s mum has a lot of fear about Vlad losing his vampire identity and his connection to his vampire heritage. She loves him, even though she is fierce, and she is quietly surprised by and proud of him in the end. But she worries that he might become too human and forget who he really is. My mum worried about me moving away from Kent and losing touch with my roots. She worried about me wanting to be a writer when we all know that it doesn’t pay unless you are really lucky! She really wanted me to be a teacher. Ironically I now teach a lot, but sadly she never got to see that… I think if there is any sort of message, I would love readers to understand that it’s important to be true to yourself and not try to please other people. That’s when you find real happiness – and real friends as well.
4. When did your journey as a writer begin? Was it always your aim to write for children?
My journey began when I could first hold a pencil. I still have the old desk diaries my grandfather gave me as I was always wanting to scribble and there was not enough paper around to keep me busy! I started by trying to copy letters and just wrote strings of them, making up my own words and drawing pictures to go with them. Once at school I loved writing stories and poems and doing projects that involved lots of writing. I lost confidence when I was a teenager and wrote only in my private diaries, but I started having a go at poetry again when I was a student, writing for the college magazine and writing poems and sketches for friends. I never thought I would have a book published. I went into publishing to stay in the book world, thinking, “At least I can help other people get published.” Then I was given the opportunity to write a few books for babies for the publisher I was working for at the time – Macmillan Children’s Books. My boss Kate Wilson, now the Head Honcho at Nosy Crow, liked what I wrote and asked if I would have a go at writing a picture book based on the rhyme Over in the Meadow, but set in the African savannah. I turned the idea into Over in the Grasslands, illustrated by Alison Bartlett. I had been lucky enough to go to Tanzania the year before, so I was able to draw on my experiences of going on safari. This gave me the confidence to keep writing, and now, nearly 25 years on, I have published over 60 books, poems and short stories for children and a memoir for adult readers – A Place for Everything. I hope I will continue to write for both adults and children for many more years to come!
5. It must be so exciting to see your writing come to life with illustrations. How is an illustrator chosen for your books?
I love the way words and pictures dance together in picture books. You can’t ever say one medium is more important than the other, so when I write I am always trying to leave space for the illustrator’s interpretation. A good illustrator (and all mine are – I can say that because I don’t choose them, the publisher does) seems to be able to read my mind so that I am always blown away by their depictions of what is in my mind’s eye when I write. And then when I read the books to children, they come to the books on an entirely different level again and notice things in the text and the pictures that I did not notice! It’s really like magic, seeing a picture book come together when it started as only a few words in my mind. The publisher chooses because they know what sells and they have far better contacts than I do as well. Sometimes they choose someone well-known such as Sarah Massini who illustrated Grandpa and the Kingfisher, sometimes they choose someone at the beginning of their illustration career, as Harry Woodgate was when they started work on Shine Like the Stars – and now Harry is very much in demand by others, so it proves publishers know what they are doing!
6. Which other children’s authors do you particularly enjoy reading?
I’m always excited when Joanna Nadin publishes a new book. Her series for young readers, The Worst Class in the World, illustrated by the hugely talented Rikin Parekh, is guaranteed to have me snorting my coffee through my noise. It really is laugh-out loud hilarious! I also love the equally hilarious Grimwood series by Nadia Shireen and the Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton, illustrated by David Tazzyman. One of my favourite picture book writer/illustrators is Chris Haughton. I love Oh no, George! as my fox-red Lab is exactly like the eponymous anti-hero – always getting into trouble, quite by accident, you understand… I definitely love funny books the most – and I appreciate them as I know how difficult they are to write. I also love the classics. Joan Aiken will always be one of my favourite writers – I have re-read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase many times. I was lucky enough to meet Joan when I was 10, on the same day I met Roald Dahl! She was kinder than he was…
7. Congratulations on your latest book Paddington in Peru. How did the opportunity to write this come about?
I used to work for HarperCollins as a children’s book editor and was very fortunate to be given the task of looking after Michael Bond’s Paddington books. We were in the process of turning some of his best-loved stories into individual full-colour chapter books and picture books. I had the huge pleasure of getting to know Michael very well during this time. He would take me out for lovely lunches or ask me round to his house to have a glass of champagne with him and his wife, Sue. (He had a fridge full of mini champagne bottles!) They had a house guinea pig called Olga (all of his guinea pigs were called Olga da Polga, like the character in his books of the same name) and I used to have a cuddle with her while we chatted. I moved to France shortly after this and as Michael and Sue had a flat in Paris I used to meet him there, so our friendship developed further. When Michael became very sick at the end of his life, Paddington 2 was in production. My agent Hilary Delamere was also Michael’s agent – she suggested to him that I write the novelisation of the second movie as they were looking for a new writer. I was honoured that he agreed. That was the last I heard from him as he died a few months later at the grand old age of 91. He was still writing a Paddington story from his hospital bed. When it was announced that there would be a third Paddington movie, my agent suggested me again and the estate agreed that I could write Paddington in Peru.
8. In what order did the book, script and film come? Are you given the script to base the book upon or is the film based upon your book?
The scripts came first. There is a team of writers and the script changes right up until the last minute, so although I wrote the first draft of the book based on a fairly finished draft, during the five months or so that I was working on the book scenes were cut or changed and this meant I had to rewrite the book to match. It all feels very “seat of the pants” compared with writing a “normal” novel, but I loved it! It is so exciting to feel you are a part of things, even though all the ideas come from the script. I had to stick exactly to the dialogue that appears in the film, but I was allowed a little leeway when it came to descriptions as there were only stage directions in the script, and obviously I had to flesh out scenes to make them easy for a reader to visualise. I also had to think about how the characters would react to one another and their circumstances, so I had to write in body language and so on. There were still some changes to the script after the book had to go to print, so if you read the book while watching the film, you’ll see some tiny differences! And sometimes I had to play around with the order of things as in a film you can cut away quickly to different scenes but in a book you have to explain things a bit more – hold the reader’s hand, as it were.
9. Are you able to give Spy Readers a hint as to what we can look forward to from you next?
I am line-editing my first novel for adults. I’ve been working on it for four years in between other things. It’s a historical romance set in Cornwall. I have an agent for it, but no publisher. Yet. (Ever the optimist!) I also have a couple of picture books brewing. One is also set in Cornwall about a cute little dog.