Trained dragons, wondrous wizards and mysterious worlds: Cressida Cowell has conjured them all. Caroline Horn talks to the popular children’s author
If there is one thing that excites Cressida Cowell, it’s hearing from children whose passion for reading or writing has been sparked by one of her books. In the past year alone, the author of novel series How to Train Your Dragon has met over 15,000 children on her mission to encourage reading for enjoyment – and all that while completing the first book in her new series, The Wizards of Once.
In December Cressida’s tireless zeal was rewarded with the 2017 Ruth Rendell Award for the championing of literacy, and as the annual World Book Day looms once more (March 1), her passion shows no sign of waning.
What drives it, she says, is the fond recollection of her own 1970s childhood, rich with adventure and imagination: a lost world filled with happy holiday visits to a previously uninhabited island off the Scottish coast. There, separated for weeks from electricity and television, she and her siblings had to resort to their own ingenuity and their father’s storytelling for entertainment.
“It was a time when the adults’ idea of childcare was to open the back door and say: ‘Come back when you’re hungry,’” chuckles Cressida.
Days were spent on boats (“not a life jacket in sight”), swimming and catching crabs, or camping and exploring Viking ruins. And it’s the “wildness” of that childhood that Cressida, as an author, is trying to convey.
“My books are all about sparking children to think creatively about the world around them,” she says.
Indeed, the landscapes of Cressida’s early years played a key role in forging the storyteller of today. For the How to Train Your Dragon books – all about Hiccup, the hapless Viking chief’s son and his quest to become a leader – the Scottish islands provided the backdrop. But it was the Iron Age scenery of West Sussex, closer to her current home in West London, that helped to inspire The Wizards of Once, a powerful and richly layered story about what happens when the worlds of magic and non-magic collide.
“As children, we would go and stay with my grandmother in West Sussex and behind her house was this Iron Age hill fort called The Trundle. There was no sign saying: ‘This is a 3,000-year-old hill fort’ – we would just toboggan down it!
“It’s huge though. You can see how the landscape could have inspired the belief that giants once possessed this land. Who else could have created these massive hills or monuments like Stonehenge?”
Nearby Levin Down, another striking eminence, derives its present name from the 17th century designation Leaven Doune, or ‘Leave Alone Hill’. Too steep to plough, it was consequently ‘left alone’ and uncultivated. Cressida, however, had a different etymological take.
“There were little mounds all over it and I thought they were the hill forts of fairies,” she says. “That was my personal response, but this kind of landscape has inspired fairy tales for millennia.”
Cressida at home in her writing shed
Set in a land of twisted, dark forests, where powerful wizards rub shoulders with sprites, giants and snowcats, The Wizards of Once draws heavily on this terrain. Into her mysterious world Cowell brings an invading warrior tribe that ushers in the Iron Age, complete with splendid new hill forts. The story is driven by two children from opposing sides – Wish, the daughter of the Warrior Queen, and Xar, son of the King of the Wizards – and follows what happens when they meet.
It took “buckets and buckets” of research into the period to get a feel for it in her writing, admits Cressida. She went to some of the more spectacular hill forts, such as Old Oswestry Hill Fort in Shropshire, and read up on Iron Age beliefs and traditions.
In practice she frequently ignored the research during the writing process – “facts can get in the way of fantasy” – but it did yield some wonderful creative ideas. She unearthed vocabulary from the past – evocative words like ‘wortcunning’, ‘starcraft’ and ‘leechdoms’ – for use in the text and worked Iron Age traditions such as face tattoos and body painting into her illustrations.
“For me, illustrating the stories is every bit as important as writing them,” she explains. “I trained as an artist before I did my English degree, and I like to include pictures in the books because not all children are comfortable with a full page of text.”
It is through these tales that Cressida hopes to impart a sense of wonder and excitement at the natural world, as well as a love of stories similar to that bequeathed to her in childhood by her father. She wants adults to read to their children beyond the point at which children can read to themselves.
“Books have the ability to make us laugh or cry. I want children to be able to see that a particular story has made their dad cry, because that sends such a powerful message.
“One of the things I loved about How to Train Your Dragon was hearing from whole families who had enjoyed reading the books together. Hearing stories being read is so important during the early years. If parents would read aloud to their children for just10 minutes a day, it could make such a difference.”
Meanwhile the work goes on. The first of The Wizards of Once books is already clocking up fans (young and old) and Cressida is currently writing book two. As for How to Train Your Dragon, the third film in the series is expected next year. How good to know that its producer, Dreamworks, has already snapped up the rights to Wizards too.
SAVE THE DATE
World Book Day 2018 takes place on March 1. It is a celebration of writing, authors, books, illustration and most importantly reading!
Fifteen million children at schools and nurseries across the country will receive a £1 Book Token, which can be redeemed against one of the 10 WBD titles by popular authors, including Michael Bond and Kes Gray or can be used to discount one of the £2.50 titles for older readers.
Cash-in your tokens at Barton’s Bookshop (Leatherhead), bartonsbookshop.co.uk; The Cobham Bookshop, cobhambooks.com; Waterstones (Redhill, Dorking, Epsom), waterstones.com
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