The Gruffalo author talks about life after losing her husband and collaborator, Malcolm – and her chart-topping niece Lola Young.
Julia Donaldson has become an unofficial member of my family. Every day we read about the eavesdropping ladybird, the plucky mouse, the witch, the Superworm or the Teeny Weeny Genie. We’ve wolfed down the dozen film adaptations, been on a Gruffalo trail in an arboretum, and endlessly listen to Stick Man and The Highway Rat.
So when I meet the creator of all these stories, I half curtsy. “It’s an honour to meet you,” I say before wittering about my 2-year-old son. Unsurprisingly Donaldson is unfazed by such fangirling; meeting overexcited parents who believe that their children are special has long been part of her role as the doyenne of children’s literature.
Her new book, Gozzle, tells the tale of a freshly hatched gosling who attaches herself to a reluctant bear convinced he is “Daddy”. Over the changing seasons the bear gets less grouchy, Gozzle grows up and flies the cave and – spoiler alert – the pair reunite. It is lump-in-the-throat stuff, thanks to Sara Ogilvie’s illustrations.
“A child can be terribly annoying and you wish you had some more of your own time,” Donaldson says of the theme, flicking through a copy. “But then you find that you love them to bits and when they’re asleep you want to go and look at them.” She points to Ogilvie’s drawings. “I do particularly love these illustrations.”
The 76-year-old author isn’t sure exactly what number book this is, but her tally has now topped 200 and she admits that the thrill of sending a new story into the world isn’t quite what it was in the days of A Squash and a Squeeze (1993), The Gruffalo (1999) and Room on the Broom (2001).
This is the first interview that Donaldson has given since her husband of 52 years, Malcolm, died of cancer in September, aged 75. The couple had three children (their eldest son, Hamish, suffered from a schizoaffective disorder and took his own life aged 25 in 2003), nine grandchildren and a passion for performing together.
In their twenties, when she was studying French and drama and Malcolm was a medical student, they busked in Paris: “We’d have to compete with the traffic on the Champs Élysées.” In later decades they performed Donaldson’s works at arts festivals and events around the world. They also dressed up and put on play versions of The Gruffalo, The Ugly Five and other popular Donaldson tales. Malcolm was both a distinguished endocrinologist (in his day job) and a distinguished guitar player.
The Gruffalo is a story of a wily mouse who wards off various predators in the “deep dark wood” by talking about a knobbly kneed monster he’s about to meet. Putting it on as a show, typically, Donaldson would play the mouse and her husband would play the suave fox (although his young patients knew him as Dr Gruffalo).
“When we were rehearsing the roles, when we knew he was going to die, I just burst into tears when he was the fox. I suppose everyone knew [the situation]. But it seemed a funny thing to make someone dissolve into tears - someone saying, “Where are you going to, little brown mouse?” she recalls, smiling at the memory.
Throughout our conversation at her publisher’s office in central London, Donaldson speaks proudly of her husband - how he’d put on a deep Welsh “Dylan Thomas voice” (although he was from Surrey) to read her work before it was published, how he could play anything by ear on the piano and the way he gamely threw himself into their productions.
She recalls him unexpectedly casting for a forthcoming production of The Detective Dog (a 2016 Donaldson book), which they were putting on in their home town of Steyning, West Sussex. “Malcolm just went up to this woman in the post office because she had a very sweet dog, who didn’t look anything like the dog in the book, and asked, ‘Does your dog like acting?’ Then the woman took it very seriously, and she acted as the dog’s owner.”
Malcolm was ill for three and a half months; it sounds like a good death. “It was long enough to talk, to see the people he wanted to see and do these shows. And it wasn’t so long that it was dragging on and on,” Donaldson says. “It wasn’t so long that I got into this nurse role. He didn’t have Alzheimer’s. He’d always said he’d rather die of an illness than a heart attack. He’d rather have time to say goodbye. I’d love to have another 10 years or so. Of course I would.”
She said her goodbyes happy in the knowledge that they’d enjoyed myriad adventures together. “We have done all the shows for years and years, and we’ve had great fun, and a lot of arguments as well. So it’s not as if I’m thinking, oh we never did this, or if only we’d done that,” she says, determinedly focused on silver linings.
Donaldson doesn’t want to dwell on her grief and is clearly keeping busy with work, travel and socialising. “I’m seeing lots of friends and family, in probably quite a self-protective way.” She recently had relatives over, including her niece the chart-topping pop star Lola Young, and they all threw themselves into a guitar-playing singalong. “We just started jamming and singing Carole King songs.”
Young, 24, is best known for her 2024 hit Messy – “And I’m too perfect till I show you that I’m not/ A thousand people I could be for you and you hate the f***ing lot” runs one chorus line. But when Young was a small child she sang a Stick Man song for recordings on her website.
Donaldson pooh-poohs the notion that she helped Young’s singer-songwriter career. “Someone apparently tweeted something like, ‘Oh, so she jumped up from nowhere and now I find out that her aunt wrote The Gruffalo,’” she says. “As if I could have any influence whatsoever!”
The day after we meet she is heading to Scotland to visit her youngest son, Jerry, and his six children. She avoids picking her own books when reading to her grandchildren. “I don’t want to feel awful if they get bored.”
I ask whether Donaldson feels awkward about dominating the children’s market but she interrupts. “Not just the children’s market,” she says, firmly. “Now I am the bestselling author by volume of books since records began. But not in money [terms].”
It’s true: in January Donaldson (and The Gruffalo) knocked J.K. Rowling (and Harry Potter) off the top spot. Her lifetime sales in the UK stand at 48.6 million units versus Rowling’s 48 million, according to the market analyst Nielsen’s statistics. “I was jolly thrilled,” she says, pointing out that Rowling is more successful globally. “I don’t feel any sense of rivalry, or ‘nah nah, I’m better than you’, there’s none of that - just it’s lovely to be acknowledged and appreciated.”
Although a multimillionaire many times over, Donaldson insists that she is not loaded as people tend to assume: irksome journalists tend to quote figures that are the turnover of the publisher rather than her earnings.
“I’m not at all grumbling. I am very rich, really. I never thought I’d have earned the money that I have, but it’s a fraction of the figures that get bandied around,” she says. As a wartime baby she likes a bargain and had to talk herself into buying a first-class train ticket for her trip to Scotland.
We return to whether she feels awkward about (almost) holding a monopoly over the market. “I suppose I do think maybe some aspiring children’s writer wants to come and stab me in the night,” she says, grinning. “I’m enjoying this popularity but, at the same time, part of me thinks it’s not really fair. And nowadays, when supermarkets account for a lot of sales and the supermarkets only take a small proportion of the books available ... I can quite see if your book isn’t in supermarkets, you’d feel a bit fed up.”
There have now been 12 film adaptations, starting with the Oscar-nominated The Gruffalo in 2009. I raise a recent critical piece in the Spectator magazine headlined: “When will the BBC stop adapting Julia Donaldson books?”
“There was a snarky thing in the Telegraph too, but then the reviewer gave it five stars,” she says, referring to the recent film adaptation of Tiddler, her story about a small fish with tall tales. “It’s just inevitable. There’s a certain amount of resentment and, dare I say it, jealousy. I think Terry Wogan said this once, you take success as well as failure with a pinch of salt.”
There seems little danger of getting too big for her boots. “Let’s face it, I may be, at the moment, the [UK’s] bestselling author, but I’m not Shakespeare, I’m not Dickens. You can bask in success but just don’t take it too seriously.”
Her drive to create is largely focused on performing rather than writing. “I just do the writing when I have a good idea, or when I think, come on, Julia, so-and-so needs a book [to illustrate],’ she says, conscious not to name anyone specific as she works with several. “That is a motivation, when I think, oh dear, they haven’t had a book in a while.”
Donaldson is unfussed by the seemingly infinite cohort of celebrity children’s authors. “If they’re good, they’re good, if they’re not ... ” she trails off. The only celebrity author she has read is David Walliams, and points out that he was a sketch writer first so the transition makes sense.
A former children’s laureate from 2011 to 2013, she talks about the importance of school libraries in encouraging children to read for pleasure, and muses on artificial intelliegence (AI) eating authors’ lunches. “There’s a lot of not very good authors out there, then there’s AI that can do a fairly decent job, better than some authors.”
But top-notch authors, she thinks, are probably safe: the robots will find it tricky to successfully recreate that “crazy quirkiness when you’re juxtaposing unlikely ideas”.
She was unimpressed by an AI’s offering when it was tasked (by a friend) to write a rhyming story “in the style of Julia Donaldson”. “Once there was a little mole that lived in a little hole. He didn’t very much like his house, so he went to live with a little brown mouse,” she recites AI’s beginning. “It’s got the sort of circular nature of the stories and the rhymes, but it didn’t scan very well.”
Five months after her husband’s death, Donaldson is determined to keep performing. An understudy will take on Malcolm’s parts in various shows later this year. “This understudy does a good job but no one gets the laughs that Malcolm got.” At the Edinburgh Fringe, however, it will be Jerry stepping into his father’s shoes to perform and play guitar. “We will just have to see how it goes,” Donaldson says, sounding like the lifelong performer she is. “It’s going to be very emotional.”
Gozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie (Macmillan Children’s) is published on March 27.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London