Michael Morpurgo

I was a teacher at a primary school in Kent, reading a tedious story to my pupils, who were clearly bored. That night I complained to my wife, who said: “You’re quite good at telling stories – why don’t you make one up?” So I screwed my courage to the sticking place. At the end of the session they all shouted: “Oh, sir!” They wanted more. In one afternoon I understood what it is to be a storyteller. A colleague persuaded me to write it up and gave it to a friend at Macmillan. Luckily he liked it, and it quickly led to my first book, It Never Rained, a collection of stories about things that go wrong in children’s lives.

Geraldine McCaughrean

At nine, I wrote stories about horses, always horses. After my clever brother got a book published at 14, I tried too. But as a teenager I wrote adult books about Love and Russia, wanting to be Turgenev. So the manuscripts I submitted were all rejected. Meanwhile, I became friends with a children’s publisher. One day he suggested writing a novel – “Not historical; nobody’s reading historical right now” – I returned months later, breathless, with my finished novel . . . set in the Middle Ages. And the dear man published it anyway – even though my book was unfashionable and I was unknown.

Michael Rosen

I hawked my poems around several publishers. The reply that came back was: “Children don't like poems written from their point of view.” In the end, the poems arrived on the desk of Pam Royds at Andre Deutsch (an old-style publishing house) and she married me to Quentin Blake (thank heaven) and thus came my first book for children in 1974, Mind Your Own Business.

Francesca Simon

In 1989 my son was born and I wrote my first story, called Wriggling Fingers, based on a silly game I used to play with him. I sent it out and got a long rejection letter saying that the book was awful and asking what warped mind could have created it! A year later I wrote two more picture-book stories, and finally Poppa Forgot was accepted. It was the most thrilling moment of my life.

David Almond

I never planned to be a children’s writer. I wrote short stories for obscure and wonderful magazines. Then one day a new story flared into life. I knew that it was the culmination of years of hard work and, amazingly, that it was a children’s novel. Skellig was taken by the first publisher to read it, it won a string of prizes, and has been published in 30 languages. I was an overnight success after almost 20 years.

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