the latter, he says that the ‘CHOMP!’ towards the end is ‘one of my proudest moments in picture books’. Much of the joy of the books lie in the combination of Stower’s fluid line-drawn illustrative style and the twists in the tail of the narrative, a common characteristic of his work.


He has also illustrated numerous other picture books, including Bottoms Up, written by Jeanne Willis, which won the Red House Children’s Book Award and the sequel, Sing a Song of Bottoms which was shortlisted for the Early Years Award. Other artwork includes illustrating Timothy Knapman’s Mungo adventures and creating cover artworks for Gareth P Jones.


It’s a packed career that began as soon as he graduated from Brighton University with an MA in illustration, following a first class degree from Norwich School of Art. Picking up any work he could get, from government leaflets on obesity to maths textbooks (‘brief: draw a jar full of 147 buttons and make it look interesting’) was a ‘great apprenticeship in illustration’, he says. After being asked to illustrate some Shakespeare stories for a textbook he realised that fiction was what he most loved to illustrate and gradually began to be offered more stories and fewer government information leaflets.


Like one of his heroes, Chris Riddell, he is passionate about the value of learning to draw and sketches constantly (and impressively – it’s a treat to have the chance to flick through his sketchbooks and see how he captures a personality in a few lines while people- watching in cafes). It all feeds into the work.


‘When you’re coming to illustrating from your imagination, you want your character to be able to perform whatever task you set them,’ he explains. ‘I think of it like theatre with a picture book, because you’re doing the set design, the lighting – these are all considerations and a lot of them happen as second nature, but, really, you populate the scene and your cast tell the story for you. And so your cast has to be able to perform everything the story demands of them.’


playing outside and building dens and treehouses in the forest in those long summer holidays,’ he says. He was also surrounded by books, due to his mother’s job as a librarian, and drew constantly.


Less idyllic were his years as a boarder from the age of nine at a school in Norfolk, steeped in boarding school traditions of ex-army teachers, power-mad prefects and the ‘fagging system’. However, it has provided a rich seam of grotesque, Dahl-esque characters for his books, from Monty Grabbe, the school bully who terrorises Ben Pole, to dastardly Professor Pickering, who sports a false eye made from a ping pong ball with a dot drawn on it.


While Stower is an established picture book author/illustrator, with seven titles of his own and numerous collaborations under his belt, writing King Coo was a departure for him and not always an easy one.


‘I’ve learned so much,’ he says. ‘I found the first book difficult because I was so fresh to it and trying to find my own voice and my way of writing. I was always so used to distilling ideas into text for picture books and suddenly I had all this space and so I went massively over word count. My editor just said, “everything you write has to move the story forward”. That was such good advice because it stopped me spending half a page describing someone’s shoes. By the second book I found that I learned certain lessons which really helped speed the process up.’


Stower’s illustration has always had a strong narrative quality, from his first picture book Two Left Feet in 2004. His favourites are the award-winning Silly Doggy (2011), the truly delightful tale of a small child, Lily, who finds a bear in her garden and decides it’s a dog (“one morning Lily saw something wonderful in the garden. It was big brown and hairy with four legs, a tail and a big wet nose and Lily had always wanted one”), and Troll and the Oliver (2013). Of


King Coo The Curse of the Mummy’s Gold, David Fickling Books, 978-1788450522, £6.99 King Coo, David Fickling Books, 978-1910989418, £6.99 Bottoms Up, Jeanne Willis, illus Adam Stower, Puffin, 978-0141502137, £6.99 pbk Sing a Song of Bottoms, Jeanne Willis, illus Adam Stower, Puffin, 978-0141328805, £6.99 pbk


Two Left Feet, Bloomsbury, 978-0747571438 9780747568964, £6.99 Silly Doggy, Templar, 978-1848774520, £6.99 Troll and the Oliver, Templar, 978-1848771734, £7.99


Michelle Pauli is a freelance writer and editor specialising in books and education. She created and edited the Guardian children’s books site.


Books for Keeps No.237 July 2019 9


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