Julia Donaldson: Dads make the best storytellers

Julia Donaldson performs her stories using puppets

Julia Donaldson is the author of 150 children’s books, including the ten-million-selling The Gruffalo, Children’s Laureate and recently gonged Member of the British Empire. She has a confession to make.

She’s tallking to DaddyBeGood about the role of fathers in teaching children to read. But as the conversation turns to the occasionally bumbling, pompous portrayal of men in children’s literature and TV, she looks somewhat sheepish.

“I can’t say I’m completely innocent of that in my own work,” she says. “My husband Malcolm and I travel the country doing live performances of my books and he often complains that, as a man, he usually has to play somebody bad or stupid. He’d like to be somebody clever. I often remind him that the mouse in the The Gruffalo is very bright. But he is a rare exception.

“The problem is that children’s authors try to do something different to the traditional powerful, dominant father figure, but then it quickly becomes a cliché. But it’s the same for me, as a grandmother. You never see a knitting granny nowadays in children’s books – they’re all on motorbikes.”

Despite this, Julia, 63, believes more fathers than ever are reading to their kids.

“You see statistics saying only two in three parents read to their children, but I think if you went back 20 years it would be even fewer,” she says. “My impression is that people who wouldn’t previously read to their kids do now.”

Julia’s love of literature was sparked by her own father, who gave her The Book Of A Thousand Poems for her fifth birthday. Her grandmother, who lived with her family in Hampstead, London, during her childhood, also gave her books which she still treasures.

What are her memories of her own dad? “He had polio, so was in a wheelchair from when I was six, but he was quite hands-on,” she says. “In those days parents weren’t as into their children as now, but he was great at puzzles and number games, and was very musical. He would always read us bedtime stories.

“He worked in genetics, studying twins, and sometimes he’d bring home fun tests for me and my younger sister Mary to do, to see how genetically alike we were. They were great fun.”

Julia says she has seen a marked increase in dads’ involvement over three generations.

“Malcolm and I always shared the housework evenly, which was a big change for him, compared with his own father,” she says. “Moving forward to today, my son Chris is incredibly involved with his one-year-old, like so many of today’s dads. It’s a big change from my day, when they just let kids get on with it.”

Whether it’s in the library, at home, or at her performances, Julia says she is constantly impressed by how well fathers read to their children.

“Dads love doing accents,” she says. “They come up to me all the time and say things like, ‘Actually the Gruffalo is an Australian,’ or ‘Did you know the Snail from The Snail And The Whale is from Birmingham?’

“I always get men up on stage at my live shows because dads make the best storytellers. I’ve never had a dad fail to come up trumps, whether it’s playing a baddie in What The Ladybird Heard or holding their children upside down when we read Monkey Puzzle. They’re always up for that.”

Julia’s current book with illustrator Axel Scheffler is Highway Rat (see below), and the next features a worm with superpowers. She has a series of plays for schools in the pipeline and is thrilled to have stepped into the shoes of previous Children’s Laureates, including Quentin Blake and Jacqueline Wilson. She admits it was Malcolm who persuaded her to take up the challenge.

At the top of Julia’s to-do list a battle to keep libraries open in the face of swingeing public spending cuts, something she is asking dads to get behind. To this end, she’ll be touring the country’s libraries throughout her two-year tenure.

“Libraries are a wonderful resource and over the last six years the number of children using them has gone up year after year,” she says. “Schemes like Rhyme Time, for little ones, or the Summer Reading Challenge are brilliant.

“Children take out two books, read them, and tell their librarian what they like. The librarian finds them similar books to read, and they get little badges and stuff. I can’t recommend it enough.”

The Highway Rat, by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler, is out now. £10.99, Alison Green Books (Scholastic)

For more about Julia visit The Daddy Diaries

Competition: win a copy of The Highway Rat