Julia Donaldson

Julia Catherine Donaldson (Shields; born 16 September 1948) is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate.

She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man.

After the war, they were reunited and married, and in 1950 they bought the Hampstead house together with Jerry's mother, his sister Beta and her husband Chris (the two men had met in the P.O.W. camp).

When Donaldson was six her father contracted polio and thereafter was confined to a wheelchair, though he still led an active life, working as a lecturer in the Maudsley Hospital's Institute of Psychiatry, where he pioneered genetic studies using the model of identical twins brought up apart.

Elizabeth worked as a part-time secretary and helped her boss, Leslie Minchin, translate German lieder into English.

It was a household of music and song: Elizabeth sang with the Hampstead Choral Society, Jerry played the cello in amateur string quartets, and both parents were active members of the Hampstead Music Club.

Summer holidays were at Grittleton House in Wiltshire, where Jerry played his cello in a summer school for chamber music, while Julia and Mary romped around and put on musical shows with the other children.

Poetry also featured strongly in Donaldson's early life; she was given The Book of a Thousand Poems by her father when she was five years old, and her grandmother introduced her to Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes.

Donaldson attended New End Primary School and then Camden School for Girls.

During her childhood and adolescence she acted (understudying the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Old Vic where she made the acquaintance of a young Judi Dench and Tom Courtenay), sang with the Children's Opera Group, and learned the piano.

A good linguist, she learned French and German at school and later picked up Italian through a summer tutoring job with a family in Naples, so that by the age of 19 she had a good grasp of all three languages.

Donaldson studied Drama and French at Bristol University (1967–1970), graduating with a 2:1 honours degree.

During her time there she acted in departmental productions and learnt the guitar.

In 1968, she and her friend Maureen Purkis took part in the play I am not the Eiffel Tower with music composed by Colin Sell, an accomplished young pianist who was studying Spanish and Portuguese at Bristol and who has gone on to appear in BBC Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

Sell's roommate Malcolm Donaldson, a medical student who played left-handed guitar and was a keen amateur actor, came to see the show and subsequently teamed up with Sell, Donaldson and Purkis to sing in the pubs during Bristol University Rag Week in early 1969.

Almost immediately after this Donaldson and Purkis were seconded to live in Paris for six months as part of their degree course where they sang and played their guitars to café audiences for money.

Malcolm joined them in the summer and the trio performed various songs by the Beatles and from musicals including Hair.

After several weeks of busking in Paris, Malcolm followed Julia and Maureen to the Avignon Festival.

Here his attempts to sleep on their youth hostel floor led to eviction and the trio moved out, sleeping in a camp site and even a field, by which time a deep friendship had been formed.

During their time in Paris the group were spotted by a French entrepreneur who auditioned them.

While nothing came of this Donaldson and Purkis penned a tune to the traditional French poem "Metamorphosis" specifically for the audition, the first time that Donaldson had composed a song for an occasion (apart from the childhood shows).

By December 1969 Julia and Malcolm had become an item.

They began to supply cabaret for the occasional university social event, and in 1970 they visited America, travelling by Greyhound bus from the East to the West coast and busking in Seattle and San Francisco.

On their return the duo played in restaurants and began to participate in events as diverse as the Crystal Palace Children's Day, an Easter Parade in London and a dental congress dinner – with Julia Donaldson composing songs specially for these occasions.

The couple continued to busk in Europe during holidays, including in France and Italy, with Julia Donaldson writing "The French Busking Song" in French, and "The Spaghetti Song" in Italian.

By 1971, Donaldson was working in London at Michael Joseph publishers as a secretary to Anthea Joseph but was also given considerable leeway as a junior editor.

At weekends she and Malcolm took part in the Bristol Street Theatre, a group of mainly postgraduate students inspired by the late playwright David Illingworth.

The group devised simple, unscripted plays which could be performed in the playgrounds of poor council estates and which recruited children from the audience to take over some of the roles.

This was to have a lasting effect on Donaldson's interaction with children in her own shows as an established children's writer.

The couple were married in September 1972, Donaldson composing an operetta which she and Malcolm, their best man Colin Sell, the bridesmaids and ushers performed at the reception in Burgh House, Hampstead.

A picture of the wedding is on display in the house today.

She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993.

Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops.

The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford University Press's Oxford Reading Tree.

Donaldson was born and brought up in Hampstead, London, with her younger sister Mary.

The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath.

Her parents, sister and their pet cat Geoffrey lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle (and later their children, James and Kate) on the first floor and her grandmother on the second floor.

Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years.

Jerry, who had studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp where his knowledge of German earned him the position of an interpreter.

Elizabeth, also a good German speaker with a degree in languages, meanwhile did war work in the WRNS.