Featured image: Freya Barwell

Award-winning author and illustrator Lauren Child CBE visited Manchester Metropolitan University this week, sharing insights into her creative career and discussing her new children’s book, I Am Wishing Everyday For Christmas.

Best known for her children’s picture book series Clarice Bean, Ruby Redfort, and Charlie and Lola – the latter adapted into a BAFTA-winning TV show (2005 – 2008) – Child has established herself as one of most recognised figures in children’s literature. She was awarded both the Kate Greenaway Medal and Carnegie Medal in 2000 for her first book, I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, later becoming an MBE in 2010 and receiving a CBE in 2021.

The event, organised and introduced by publishing lecturer Debbie Williams, offered students an in-depth look at the world of illustration and publishing. Child reflected on career milestones and discussed her long-standing collaboration with book designer David Mackintosh, who joined her in exploring the design process behind bringing her stories to life.

Child’s dedication and contribution to children’s literature led to her role as Waterstones’ 10th Children’s Laureate from 2017-2019, a role served to promote literacy and creativity, advocating for the importance of storytelling and encouraging a love for reading from an early age. 

“A story book is a conversation and a picture book is a conversation, and I think we’ve forgotten that you bond when you read a picture book with a child,” Child said. She explained that picture books provoke benefits for both child and parent, adding: “You begin to understand so much more about the child and the child understands more about you, and it’s a really gentle way into learning to read, but also understanding the story and understanding yourself.”

Speaking to aAh! Magazine ahead of the talk, Child discussed her time serving as Children’s Laureate in 2018, when she acted as a judge at The Betjemans Young Poetry Prize, a national competition in which encouraged children aged 10-13 to submit poetry entries.

“The idea was that they would write and submit a poem, and the theme was always ‘place,’ which is really clever because it’s really open as a theme. The entries they got were just amazing, extraordinary,” Child said.

Following this, Child partnered with House of Illustration and The Betjemans Young Poetry Prize to create The Lauren Child Poetry Illustration Prize for Illustrators aged 18-25. She described the initiative as one of her most memorable career moments: “I thought the entries were so amazing that it would be lovely to join up with young illustrators because a really good way of understanding how to illustrate is to illustrate a poem.”

She added: “You just saw how many talented young illustrators are out there, and so that’s something I’d really love to resurrect with the Quentin Blake Illustration Centre which is opening in May.”

In 2000, Child published the first Charlie and Lola book, I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato. 25 years later, she has released a new addition to the series, I Am Wishing Everyday For Christmas, a story which she said took more than 20 years to complete. “The biggest challenge was that I started it several times,” she explained.

“You usually only have 32 pages, and that is a very tiny amount of space, so it’s not many words, and Christmas is a huge subject – what are you going to talk about?”

The picturebook reflects the excitement and difficulty of waiting for Christmas from a young child’s experience. “When I revisited Charlie and Lola’s Christmas, I realised, ‘This is all about waiting’: It’s waiting for me to finish the book, it’s waiting for ideas to come, it’s waiting to create something that is important and special, and not being able to get there. That was my own personal journey with it.”

Child also discussed the importance of creativity during the festive period, something her character Lola explores in the book: “Christmas is the time that I write to those people that I don’t see for the entire year, so I think it reminds you that you have this power to create something meaningful to connect with people,” she said.

November 2025 marks 20 years since Charlie and Lola first aired on CBeebies on November 7, 2005, beginning its successful three-year run on the channel. Child explained that the adaptation was not originally planned: “They’d wanted to turn my Clarice Bean books into TV, and the option had lapsed… I said, ‘I’m happy to sell you the Charlie and Lola ones’ and they weren’t sure at first. Then I explained these will work really well because they are teeny weeny incidents from a child’s life and little day-to-day events… I recorded my friend’s daughter reading and I convinced them that a child is the perfect person to tell the story.”

Child described the collaborative process she had with production company ‘Tiger Aspect Productions’: “They were really exciting as a production company because they hadn’t made children’s TV before and so they were very open. I worked with them two days a week and I would work with them on the stories and dialogue. I did a lot of dialogue editing and design for them, so it was a very collaborative way of working.”

Reflecting on her time working on Charlie and Lola, Child expressed her ongoing concern for young children’s literacy skills today. “We have a lot of issues now for little children not being able to read, not having access to books; we’ve had a lot of library closures and a lot of parents not able to read to their child,” she said.

She added: “With the Charlie and Lola books from the very beginning, it was about that connection between adult and child, child and child, and how we have conversations. A story book is a conversation and a picture book is a conversation, and I think we’ve sort of forgotten that you bond with a child when you read a picture book because you’re seeing the same thing that they’re seeing.”

I Am Wishing Everyday For Christmas by Lauren Child is published by Simon & Schuster.