Anthony Browne, the new Children's Laureate, is looking slightly dazed. High at the top of Centre Point, in London, six children - winners of competitions organised by The Times and Booktrust - have him surrounded in the corner of a room.

“Are your favourite animals gorillas?” Tariq Uwakwe, 9, asks. Browne's most famous book is Gorilla, about a lonely child whose father is always too busy to play with her, but whose toy gorilla changes, magically, into the kind of friend she longs for. Browne, a small, slight, hairy man whose resemblance to his chimpanzee hero, Willy, has already been remarked on during the prolonged Laureateship ceremony, beams charmingly.

“Actually, my favourite animals are people,” he says. The children look surprised. “But my next favourites are gorillas. If you've ever seen them in a zoo and looked into their eyes you'll see that it's so like looking into a person's eyes. They're very like us, you know. There's a sense of their having intelligence, emotions and feelings ...”

It's a good answer, and Tariq - who, like the other boy in the group, 12-year-old Tom Warren, had been rather hoping that Anthony Horowitz would get the job - nods slightly. Browne has already interested them by getting them to play the “shape game” - turning blobs into pictures - before an assembled audience of the cream of British children's publishing. Even those who doubted their skill at drawing had produced creditable cartoons of dinosaurs, aliens and the London Eye. All come from schools where reading and the supply of books is important. Nicola Nightingale, 11, wants to become a writer herself.

“Were your best subjects at school English and art?” she demands. They were, Browne acknowledges, but adds that he also enjoyed sport. I wonder how many of the scenes in Willy the Wimp, in which his weedy hero, a cringeing chimp, transforms himself through weightlifting, are autobiographical. His picture-books are full of people and animals being bullied - often by members of their own family - until they turn the tables. One of my own favourites is Piggybook, about a mother so exhausted and harassed by her husband and two children (who never help her with domestic work and treat her like a slave) that her face is a blank. Eventually she leaves them with a note saying “You are all pigs”. They duly descend into pig form and mess, until there is nothing left to eat. Only then does she return, and as they help and appreciate her, regain her gentle, smiling features. Browne, the J.G. Ballard of the children's book world, is both an artist and a satirist. His Hansel and Gretel is terrifying, and his admirers include Ian McEwan.

Browne, however, is telling his audience how as a child he would stand on the bar in pubs and tell stories about superheroes. He drew battle scenes, with cowboys and Indians and knights, with jokes coming out in speech bubbles. Tom asks keenly what he is hoping to achieve as Children's Laureate.

“I'm hoping to get us to value looking more than we do,” Browne answers. “We can learn so much by using art. Children, particularly, are taught to move away from pictures into words, but you can read pictures, too. I think all children are very visual, but as they get older and more self-conscious they lose it. The only difference between me and most adults is that I carried on drawing. You could all draw like me! We're taught that in maturity you leave pictures behind, but you don't have to do one at the expense of the other.”

“When I write stories,” Sofia Esposito, 9, says, “my mind is so full of ideas that I don't know which to choose. How do you do it?”

“That often happens to me, too,” Browne says, reassuringly. The children listen attentively as he tells them how he finds a way to link two or three separate ideas through one character. Some have met real authors before through school (“Though never the ones I'd really like, like Malorie Blackman or Eva Ibbotson,” says Natasha Chudasama, 11) and all are eager for tips. Had he always wanted to be a children's author?

“No, I never had a burning desire to do children's books, I wanted to be an artist,” Browne says, honestly. His books are full of brilliant, manically detailed visual jokes and references to Magritte, Dalí and de Chirico. “I worked as a medical illustrator after leaving art college - basically telling the story of an operation through drawings. Then I needed to do something else. My first picture-book wasn't very good, but then I met my editor, Julia McCrae at Walker Books, and she taught me everything I know. Now I'm paid for doing what I love. I'm very, very lucky.”

On the other side of the room the children's publishers and a couple of former laureates are in full-throated roar. By the end of the day Browne, the sixth Children's Laureate in ten years since the inception of the appointment, originally conceived by Ted Hughes, will have been interviewed by the BBC and all the national papers. Lucy Parkinson, 12, asks how autobiographical his books are. “I suppose the ones about Willy are the most personal,” Browne says. “I admit I'm a bit like Willy - a chimp in a world of gorillas who are all bigger, stronger and faster than he is. I've got used to that. But I think that a lot of children feel like that - that everybody is older, bigger, stronger and more important than we are.”

The children, granted this special audience with their new champion, nod.

www.childrenslaureate.org.uk

To download an exclusive Anthony Browne artwork click here

For Sarah Ebner's top 20 picture books see timesonline.co.uk/schoolgate

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