"It's hard to do a rat's nose front on. In fact, it's hard to draw a rat at all".
A nugget of wisdom from Lauren Child, bestselling author of Clarice Bean, That Pesky Rat, I Will Not Never Ever Eat a Tomato and, most recently, Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent. Easily the most glamorous of the current crop of superstar children's writers, she goes for a rock chick look for her Hay appearance, complete with long highlighted hair, pink skirt and tight white shirt over a black bra. Her audience of mostly pink-anorak-clad little girls were wowed.
Her slightly ditzy, self-effacing approach to her work also appeals to the adults in the audience, especially when she describes dreaming as a kid of being an only child of millionaire parents … and being sorely disappointed to find they weren't and she had two sisters. Hubert Horatio, about a genius four-year-old boy who has rich but hopeless parents, is her way of working through that disappointment, she explains. She claims that you need to know what it is like to fail in order to be a writer.
Child's work is celebrated (she's a Smarties and a Kate Greenaway medal winner) for its unique graphic style which mixes photographic montage, watercolour washes, spidery drawings and collages using textures and images from everything from magazine cutouts to shimmery skirt fabrics.
So one of the most fascinating parts of her talk (for the grown-ups at least, the kids are starting to shuffle around a bit at this point) is her demonstration of exactly how she produces an image, showing how Clarice Bean is created from a small drawing which is scanned into a computer, enlarged, cut-out and coloured in, and then layered on the page with different backgrounds. She wins the little girls over again with a Blue Peter-worthy demonstration of how the perfect fairy godmother dress can be made with a collage of a photocopied skirt and a cut-up magazine. With her endearing combination of Rolf Harris, Valerie Singleton and girl-next-door glamour, it's no surprise that Child's booksigning queue lasts for well over a couple of hours.
Finally, Lauren Child could well win the prize for the most audacious answer to that classic child's question, "how do I become a writer?"
Her response? "Read books. Oh, and watch lots of TV. Worked for me".
