teachers to do. Motivation is important in wanting to read and to enjoy that, it needs to come before teaching.”
The books that Camilla works upon gives an opportunity both to develop her understanding and also to place this into practice. Impressively, Camilla has worked on well over 300 books and has written over 200 herself. This phenomenal number is a sign of Camilla’s extraordinary energy and commitment and the journey through publishing that she has taken.
Camilla studied for an arts foundation course after school and then went on to read English Literature at University. Her first job arrived in the form of an editorial assistant position. “I loved being an editorial assistant and progressed to become an editor and a senior editor. I started to yearn for the visual side of books as having done art at A-level and foundation, I realised I was a very visual person.”
This interest in visuals led Camilla to realise she was interested in becoming involved with more commercial picture books. She was able to work within this interest area when she moved to HarperCollins becoming an editor over non-fiction and on the children’s team. “Working at Kingfisher and Macmillan, I found young picture books really fascinating and was involved with writing and conceiving a lot of books.” This continued when Camilla was Editorial Director of Campell Books a specialist maker of books for children aged between 0 and 5 that has developed a name for innovation and accessibility, “It was a very creative role where I was creating a list of titles with text and interactive elements.”
Camilla resists using the term novelty elements as she feels it sounds cheap and undermines the importance of these. “I did physics A-level and that background helps me to work out the mechanisms of books like Peekaboo Zoo. Interactivity needs to be part of a narrative rather than a mere add on. It needs to advance and deliver the story rather than just being whimsy. By driving the story, it can invite the child into the book and to take part and experience the story in a very physical way. At pre-reading and pre-talking stage of childhood, this allows experience.” The shortness of the form and sparsity of text belies the level of thought that goes into the books. The stories might be simple, but they are not simplistic as Camilla outlines. “They don’t take very long to write, but to conceive the concept and to make something which is very simple and yet incredibly rich take time. I always try to give a narrative arc of some sort. We are narrative species; stories are hard-wired into our survival mechanism
6 PEN&INC.
and into our collective psyche. We need stories to survive.”
In Camilla’s view stories are a key part of her work and of the impact of the books she creates. “Stories make the chaos of the world small enough for us to be able to understand and to make some sort of sense of it. As a parent you reduce the world to a story, otherwise there’s too much information in the world. We all need it to be curated. We tell each other stories and tell ourselves stories to understand our world. We start with the simplest stories and then build out from those. Peekaboo Zoo is a simple story about going to the zoo, but when the reader sees themself in a mirror, it literally places the child within the story and makes them a main character in the book. Every book is like a mini journey. It can be experienced physically and also engaged with too. There are participatory moments in a book like Peekaboo Zoo where children are invited to roar like a lion, to munch like a camel and so much more.”
Camilla’s career in publishing and as an author has been developed by her own experiences as a mother. “I became very interested in watching and listening to myself and how I spoke naturally and instinctively as a mother. The editor and writer that I was before I had children was very different to the one that I was after.
I realised what my children loved, what they were obsessed by, what they were baffled by. Not all children are the same. I realised the books I’d been writing weren’t quite delivering for them.”
Camilla was selected to be BookTrust Writer in residence in 2025. “The focus was on Early Years settings because after thirty years in publishing, I felt that publishing rarely directly connects with Early Years settings and can find it challenging to make those direct links.” Early Years settings are a hugely important part of a large number of childhoods as Camilla explains. “Ninety- seven per cent of children have been in an Early Years setting of some sort before starting school. I don’t want to overburden settings, but it is an interesting thing to explore how they are connecting with families on reading one- to-one at home. Techniques they might have to create a culture of reading in the setting don’t always extend to outside the setting with the families they work with.” Camilla was keen to explore the importance of shared reading in the home environment and the roles that settings could play in facilitating this. “It was small scale, but little lending libraries – a bookshelf – book bags in settings, having one-on-one shared leads with someone who sees it as part of their role was key. We created a little A4 printable
Spring-Summer 2026
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