Authorgraph No.238
Rob Biddulph Interviewed by
Louise Johns-Shepherd
In 2015 Rob Biddulph’s debut picture book, Blown Away won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, one of only two picture books to ever win this prestigious award. Over the next five years he produced a total of nine picture books including his latest, the brilliantly bonkers Show and Tell. As well as writing and illustrating his own books he illustrates for other authors, has been nominated for and won a string of awards, is the official World Book Day illustrator, has work scheduled until 2024, is branching out into longer middle grade fiction and negotiating some pretty exciting new developments. So was this a meteoric rise to fame and easily won? Not at all. Rob’s career as a children’s author and illustrator was, he says, a long time coming.
A
fter Art College and studying graphic design, Rob had a long and very successful career as a magazine art director working on many national titles. He didn’t really think about writing a picture book until he had children of his own. Reading to his three girls regularly
and listening to them talk and play inspired him to make up his own stories and characters and from there he started to work these ideas up into books. He continued to work as the Observer Magazine’s Art Director whilst he spent many years talking to agents and publishers about his work, using everything in his arsenal to try and get a book into production. He’d almost given up when he met Jodie Hodges at United Agents. She persuaded him to put together a portfolio, sketches and characters as well as his main ideas – and it was the penguins from this portfolio that captured the attention
of HarperCollins. Rob had a story about some children who were carried away whilst flying a kite and the penguins (who can’t fly) fitted better into the story than the children: Blown Away was born.
Blown Away helped Rob define his style as a picture book author, a style which is at once familiar yet distinctive and accessible. The book, like all that have followed, is written in rhyme, a conscious and deliberate decision. Rob likes writing rhyme because he likes reading it, particularly out loud to children. The idea that even very young children can tune in to the patterns and rhythms of the words so that they can almost ‘sing along’ with a story fits his intention to have children really involved when they are being read to. And having books that encourage reading aloud and that shared reading experience is what inspired Rob to become a writer in the first place. Four of Rob’s books have been chosen to be read aloud on CBeebies as bedtime stories, testament surely to the way in which those rhymes add to the story arc and support that shared reading and listening experience.
So the rhyme is really important to him and he adds: ‘For me the part of the process that is most rewarding is getting the rhyme to work and the story to flow within those constraints. It is the best feeling when it all falls into place’. The visual is also key to Rob’s process and he starts a story with a picture in his head. Then he plans out a rough and simple story arc and once he has this, spends time working on one or two set pieces or key events that he has visualised. He works these up almost to the standard they appear in the book. Having these pictures helps him with the writing because he has a concrete representation of the characters, the events and the colour palette. Then he does the writing in one block, making sure that the rhyming text is really moving the story forward.
8 Books for Keeps No.239 November 2019
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