I missed out on everything. I had always hoped that I might be discovered in a supermarket, or maybe at a bus stop – I had heard that this sometimes happened to people who then went on to lead hugely successful lives. Lauren Child is a multi-award-winning, bestselling writer and artist. She is the creator of many much-loved characters, including Clarice Bean, Ruby Redfort and Charlie and Lola. Not so long ago – or maybe a lifetime ago, I can never tell – I couldn’t really work out what I should do with my life. I found myself paralysed with indecision. I looked around me and just about everybody else seemed to know exactly what they were up to. I had no idea. My problem was that I couldn’t seem to focus on just one thing. There were too many things

Lauren Child - Wikipedia Lauren Child - Wikipedia

Lauren is also a passionate advocate for visual literacy and the importance of quality picture books for children. In 2008 Lauren launched UNESCO’s ‘My Life is a Story’ Campaign for UNESCO’s Programme for the Education of Children in Need, and was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2008.As I went on the words started weaving around the figures and sort of became part of the pictures.I came up with lots of characters because

Clarice Bean Series by Lauren Child - Goodreads

Her first two books were published in 1999 – I Want a Pet and Clarice Bean, That’s Me, and she won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 2000 for I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, the first of her Charlie and Lola picture books. Lauren published her first Clarice Bean novel in 2002 – Utterly Me, Clarice Bean. The Clarice Bean series has sold over 6 million copies worldwide. I think of CB’s dad as American, this explains why they have family in New York. People often ask me why he has a moustache when moustaches aren’t really in fashion these days. The answer is because Years of failure had taught me a lot. Even though every single publisher was saying “no”, I recognised from all the previous years of “no’s” that there was a difference – they were saying “no” but they slightly wanted to say “yes!” I could also see that compared to anything I had done before this was not bad – nothing about it was making me actually squirmI could see what she meant. I was not technically qualified to do any of the things I wanted to do and I had no money to just go ahead and set something up on my own. I needed to prove that I could come up with strong characters, create a world for them, draw and also design. Perhaps because this advice was given to me by someone successful, perhaps because I was hearing it when I was ready to listen, perhaps because it came from a total stranger, I took it on board. I didn’t know a single actual person called Clarice. I made her middle name Bean because I thought her parents were quite unconventional and might be the sort of people to give their child an unusual combination of names. as a seven year old in the picture books but got progressively older in the novels. By the time I wrote Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now, I was imagining the story as a film or TV series and I thought it would be an advantage to have a big cast.