Similar charges, meanwhile, have been levelled at Donaldson, whose dominance of the picture book genre is seen by some as crowding out the market for new titles. “Some authors are a bit sniffy about her, but I think that’s just pure and simple jealousy because she’s so successful and she gets all that shelf space,” the author and illustrator Rob Biddulph told me. “But there’s a reason for it: she’s a genius.”

A typical public event consists of acting out (more or less word-for-word) four stories, and singing three or four songs (mostly from Donaldson's three albums of songs – The Gruffalo Song and Other Songs, Room on the Broom and Other Songs and The Gruffalo's Child and Other Songs). There is always a strong element of audience participation, with children (and sometimes their parents) invited on stage to act parts in the stories. Malcolm Donaldson almost always takes part in the events, and they are also often joined by other performers including family members. Write a story about Tiddler riding somewhere on a seahorse. Where does he go to? What happens there? In 1983 the family of four moved to Bristol where Malcolm Donaldson was appointed as Senior Registrar in Paediatrics to United Bristol Hospitals. By then the television writing had dried up and the folk scene had waned. Julia Donaldson wrote and sang a few topical songs for adult radio programmes (including one about the Guinness Distillers take-over bid, which appeared on Financial World Tonight), did occasional amateur acting and street theatre, and wrote the songs for the Kingsdown community play Nine Trees Shade. She also became a volunteer in Hamish's primary school, hearing the children read aloud. She devised short plays with the right number of parts for a reading group, rotating the roles until each child had read the whole play. The piece would then be performed to the entire class. This approach seemed to build confidence in reading aloud as well as being enjoyable, and Donaldson stored the plays in a drawer for possible future use. In her 30s, she was diagnosed with “cookie-bite” hearing loss, which leaves a bite-shaped hole in the mid-range of the audible spectrum, making it difficult for her to hear some speech and music, and she is helped by lip reading. [9] Research one of the creatures in the story and write a report about it. What does each creature eat? How does it move? How is it adapted to help it live underwater?I always feel slightly guilty that we are dominating the bookshops,” Scheffler said. “I only hope that our books will open people up to buy other books.” Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. A delight from start to finish. A room of children laughing hysterically, all totally mesmerised by the action.' Time Out a b "Julia Donaldson". Desert Island Discs. 15 November 2009. BBC Radio 4 . Retrieved 18 January 2014.

Once asked to summarise her life in six words, Donaldson said: “Despite sadness, I feel very fulfilled.” I asked if, to her, happiness and fulfilment are different things. “I don’t know,” Donaldson said. “I suppose everyone has, you know, some cross to bear. You just have to carry on, I suppose. The books meant a huge amount. It was brilliant for me that I had this other side to my life that I was getting pleasure and recognition from.” Elizabeth worked as a part-time secretary and helped her boss, Leslie Minchin, translate German lieder into English. It was a household of music and song: Elizabeth sang with the Hampstead Choral Society, Jerry played the cello in amateur string quartets, and both parents were active members of the Hampstead Music Club. Summer holidays were at Grittleton House in Wiltshire, where Jerry played his cello in a summer school for chamber music, while Julia and Mary romped around and put on musical shows with the other children. The room where the children’s author Julia Donaldson writes – the heart of her vast picture book empire – is down a winding staircase, in the cellar of her grand white house in Steyning, West Sussex. Her desk looks out on the street at knee height. “I’m thinking of writing a book about legs,” Donaldson said, as she showed me around the house this summer. Children from the nearby school often wave in at her as they pass. Donaldson is well known in Steyning, due to her frequent signings at the local bookshop. She and her husband, Malcolm, a retired paediatrician, recently bought the local post office to save it from closure. But elsewhere she can walk the pavement without being recognised. “I got a letter the other day for Jacqueline Wilson,” Donaldson told me. “It said: ‘You’re my favourite author!’” If Donaldson’s books feel timely, it’s because their messages are ultimately timeless: decency, empathy, humour. “So many of Julia’s stories are about kindness,” Scheffler said. Donaldson has railed against what she calls “books as medicine” – children’s publishing’s tendency towards books with an obvious social message, such as feminism or the climate crisis. “I think now people are doing these terribly message-y books,” Donaldson told me. “I’m just as feminist as anyone else, but you know there are now lots of books to show that girls can be feisty.” She balks at the idea of picture books as activism. “Even if its message was something I really care about, like saving the planet, I probably wouldn’t do it unless I had a really juicy idea.” She studied drama at Bristol University, and in 1969 spent a summer studying in Paris with a friend. Malcolm, then a medical student and a friend-of-the-friend, joined them. The group made money busking. Malcolm played guitar and Julia sang, covers mostly, but increasingly songs of her own – little ditties in French, a song in Italian about pasta – designed to amuse the crowd. Throughout the early 70s, they spent holidays busking across Europe and the US and performing street theatre. (They wed in 1972; Donaldson composed an operetta for the occasion.) In 1977, she and Malcolm recorded an album, First Fourteen, containing some of their early songs, which have a folksy, absurdist charm, reminiscent of early Monty Python.Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years. Jerry, who had studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp where his knowledge of German earned him the position of an interpreter. Elizabeth, also a good German speaker with a degree in languages, meanwhile did war work in the WRNS.