Ian Whybrow
- Name: Ian Whybrow
- Lives: Herefordshire
- Place of Birth: Gillingham, Kent
- First Book Published: The Sniff Stories (1989)
- Hobbies: Digging; walking with his friends; swimming; cycling (especially in France); the poet Stevie Smith; the theatre and hedgehogs
- See all titles from Ian
Raaaaah for School! The first Harry book, Harry and the Snow King, was published nearly ten years ago. I bless the day I got a call from Kate Burns. She's now the publisher at Orchard but then she was working for a little outfit called Levinson Books. "I know you've never heard of us," she said. "We're small but we've got a really good list. So go on, why don't you write us a story about a kidnapped snowman?"
I thought about it for a couple of days and came up with a story about a little kid who compensates for the miserable scattering of snow you get in this country by scraping enough together to make a snowman on a plate. She liked it. "Who are you going to get to illustrate it?" I said. "Well, one of the girls who works here has got this boyfriend who's working in a bookshop in Cambridge and he's brilliant..."
"Here we go," I was thinking. "An amateur..." Of course, when I saw Adrian Reynolds' pencil and colour-wash characterisations of Harry and his family, it was like getting a well-deserved kick up the pants. The mum, Nan, Sam the-sister-who-thinks-he's-stupid and Mr Oakley, the farmer from down the lane – they all had a unique, zingy, tactile presence. Kate was right. The boy was brilliant!
Just after Snow King was published, I had another piece of luck. I saw a little boy in a garden centre playing with a bucketful of plastic dinosaurs. His mother told me that she couldn't get the bucket off him, that he took the dinosaurs everywhere, sang to them, talked to them all the time and knew all their names. From then on our Harry - Adrian's and mine - has been pretty much inseparable from his bucketful of dinosaurs and he's gone from strength to strength on the Puffin list.
Until very recently, I couldn't make up my mind how old Harry was. Then Nicola Withers, our current editor, put in a request for Harry and the Dinosaurs go to School... so that more or less fixes it.
It's a nerve-racking experience, that first day. But remember – a bucketful of dinosaurs helps a lot. Raaaaah!
Ian Whybrow's professional writing career began at the tender age of 10 when he sold a poem about a dead cat in a box to his local newspaper. From that day on he has written obsessively - verse, songs, plays, musicals, novels, advertising copy, and sketches for radio and television. "The thing about being an obsessive writer" he says, "is that it provides an excellent alibi for not being available to decorate the bathroom or unblock the drains."
Ian has now written over fifty books and is published in seventeen languages. His work includes picture and pop-up books, fiction for younger and older readers, and he has also been widely published as a poet.
Ian lives in Harrow-on-the-Hill occasionally retreating to Herefordshire to write. Apart from his wife and two daughters, his passions, in no particular order, are digging; walking with his friends; swimming; cycling (especially in France); the poet Stevie Smith; the theatre and hedgehogs.
