Luckily all the other animals are very stupid, or it wouldn't work."ĭonaldson's family life sounds amazingly wholesome.
But really it's a story about using brains over brawn. "For saying that you should tell lies to scare predators off. "Yes, I have been criticised for being immoral," says Ms Donaldson, smiling. He's a brilliant poet and under his wing, people have already done The Gruffalo in Dundee patois, Aberdeen dialect and Lowland Scots." What's the oddest language the book's appeared in? "Probably Faroese," she says after a think. Julia says: "Years ago, I met this chap called James Robertson, a well-known Scottish novelist and suggested he try it. The Gruffalo text is studded with words like "richt", "crivvens!", "bumbazed" and "dumfoonert". The most recent translations are Vietnamese and Ukrainian - and Scots dialect.
It was a huge hit - to date, it's sold 13.5m copies and been translated into 65 languages worldwide. When the mouse encounters a real gruffalo in the wood, he avoids being eaten by convincing the horned and fanged monster that he, the mouse, is the scariest dude in the wood. It's about a clever mouse who sees off the predators in the wood (fox, owl, snake) by telling them he's about to meet a scary (but made-up) gruffalo whose favourite dinner is roasted fox/boiled owl/deep-fried snake. "I feel like the miller's daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, locked in a tower until she spins straw into gold…"ĭonaldson hit the jackpot in 1999 with The Gruffalo, her third book. Their author, a sweet-faced, pageboy-haired lady with merry blue eyes and flip-flops on her feet, surveyed the mountain of books she was required to sign. When we meet at her publisher's headquarters near King's Cross station, she is sitting beside an enormous pile of her most recent book, What the Ladybird Heard Next, a sequel to the bestselling What the Ladybird Heard, two works for very young readers with illustrations by Lydia Monks both involve a barnyard of animals outsmarting a brace of robbers (who end up covered in, frankly, cow s***).
Not content with this prodigious production, she also adapts books for the stage and performs them with her husband, Malcolm, in schools and at literary festivals. The others are oriented towards classroom recitations and the like. In the past two decades, she has published 195 books, though only 60 (only!) are available in bookshops. She published her first book, A Squash and a Squeeze, in 1993 when she was 45 but she's made up for it since, in spades.
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