Julia Donaldson, author of 'The Gruffalo': “I don't like books that try to indoctrinate children” 2026

Julia Donaldson's stories easily connect with her audience thanks to her endearing characters, her ingenious endings and a very musical way of narrating: the rhymes and careful structure of her texts produce surprise on a first reading and promote anticipation and memorization on subsequent ones.

This melodious touch of works such as The Grúfalo, The Daughter of the Grúfalo, or The Most Elegant Giant (all three published by Bruño) and others such as El Dragón Zog (McMillan) or What the Ladybug Heard (Ediciones Fortuna) is not coincidental: his first book, A Squash and a Squeeze, which he published in 1993, when he was 45 years old, was, before a book, a song, since His first job for children was writing songs for the BBC. “Imagine… It's as if you ask a poet what he likes about rhyming words… For everyone who writes and cares about words, rhyme, language, that musicality is something important,” he explains.

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Music was also part of that childhood from which he claims to have never disconnected. As he likes to say, he grew up in a Victorian house with his sister Mary, his parents, his uncles and a cat named Geoffrey. His grandmother lived upstairs. Her father played the cello and her mother sang in a choir, and she made her first steps as an actress in a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was one of the fairies.

Growing up, Julia Donaldson studied Dramatic Arts and French at the University of Bristol. She decided to go to Paris for a few months to improve her language with two friends and there she met her husband, the pediatrician Malcolm Donaldson, at that time a medical student who played the guitar. It was 1969 and they were performing on the streets as buskers.

Since then, he has never abandoned that direct contact with the public. Currently, he continues visiting schools, bookstores and libraries to read and dramatize his stories. He also did it on his visit to Spain - he even learned all the lines of the little brown mouse from The Gruffalo in Spanish to be able to play the role, although he does not speak our language.

BEING PARENTS: What do those readings with children give you, why do you continue doing them?

JULIA DONALDSON: I think it takes me back to my beginnings, to the roots. Possibly I am a frustrated actress. During my time at university I was already dedicated to composing songs because I performed in the street, and I composed them so I could sing them. It's like we've come full circle, because now we sing and act out the stories and act a little but when we're done, instead of passing the cap, we get paid. In any case, I couldn't stop doing it because my husband wouldn't let me, he loves it. When we organize meetings with children he always tells me “but woman, one more song, one more story.”

SP: It seems that maintaining that connection with childhood over time has been important for you.

JD: It's true, we have always maintained that connection with the children, which is different now because we are grandparents. We have always done auditions in schools, in auditoriums full of kids, but it is different, because when you are with a group of children you can invite some of them to participate and you can tell them “you did great, you were a fantastic cat” and then you have maybe a few minutes to talk to them while you sign the books, but there are always a lot of people in line, it can't be long. But now we have six grandchildren and I have read stories to them again, and reading stories to children as individuals is a very different experience, very rewarding, very interesting, but it is also a little scary, because if I read my stories to them I want them to like them, so I usually choose to read stories by other authors to my grandchildren.

SP: And what do you read to your grandchildren when you're not reading them your own stories?

JD: Many authors, I don't know if they will be published in Spain... Jonathan Emmett [The Princess and the Little Pig], Helen Stephens [How to Hide a Lion], Quentin Blake [Mister Magnolia], those of Hairy Maclary [the furry dog ​​created by Lynley Dodd]... My seven-year-old granddaughter loves Harry Potter.

Julian Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Julia Donaldson works with many illustrators. But, without a doubt, the works that we know best in Spain and with which we most identify her are those that she has published with the German Axel Scheffler: he illustrated El Grúfalo, but also Donaldson's first album, A Squash and a Squeeze, How Mola Tu Broom, the series Cuentos del Bosque de la Bellota (Editorial Juventud), the recently published in Spain The Most Elegant Giant and many more, including the latest, The Ugly Five, by 2017, not yet published here. Their works make such a good mix that they have been defined as the John Lennon and Paul McCartney of children's literature. A fruitful collaboration that began more than two decades ago and has given a unique personality to their books.

SP: What is it like working with Axel Scheffler?

JD: Well, we never worked together, we didn't discuss the history or the books.  Which is how it almost always works, except when the author and illustrator are a married couple.  But the usual thing is that the author sends the story to the editor, he chooses an illustrator and sends him the text, he makes some sketches that he returns to the editor, and he sends them to me. So there is always the editor involved. This prevents debates or disagreements from being generated between us. In our case, we even live in different cities. This happens in many other creative fields, you see it even in operas: on the one hand there is the libretto, the story, and on the other hand the music. And it usually doesn't work like, “No, no, I want this to sound like this.” They are different creative processes.

SP: One of the great charms of your books are all those little characters that hide in the pages and live small parallel plots.

JD: Those secondary characters are up to the illustrator. And I think it's fantastic that he brings this because children pay attention to absolutely everything. We as parents, as grandparents, tend to focus a lot on reading to them what is written. And we are not aware of everything that accompanies the text. While the children are looking at the illustrations while listening to us and paying attention. I remember when I read to my oldest grandson, Tabby McTat, that it is a story in which there is a street musician like his grandparents were, in which a thief steals what is in his cap. On the first page the protagonist is singing before a crowd, and I hadn't noticed, but my grandson noticed and told me: “Look, there's the thief!” It's great that the illustrators include these details for children.

SP: Is it easy to live with the Gruffalo?

JD: The truth is that it is incredible and I always say that to a large extent I am like the little brown mouse: he invents the Gruffalo and says he is going to have tea with him, and then he finds himself in that situation. And that has happened to me a bit, I invented it and now I find it everywhere. There's a Gruffalo play, a movie, even an amusement park and, in one hiking area, a Gruffalo-specific trail. Even a costume! What I see everywhere. My husband often jokes saying “you should write a story in which you kill the Gruffalo and the little mouse”, but I'm not that cruel, I can't do it.

SP: Which other character you have created do you think deserves more attention? In Spain there are still many of his titles to be published.

There is a book that I would love to see translated, The Highway Rat, of which the BBC has made a film that will be broadcast at Christmas whose protagonist is a greedy, bad rat, who wants all the sweets for himself. We could say she's bad, but I like her. I would love for it to come to Spain.

SP: Your books have a lot of optimism and goodness, positive feelings... How do you see the “values” books that are trending now?

JD: I'm not very in favor of stories that try to get children to do things. I don't like books that try to indoctrinate children. The story of this rat that I was telling you about, greedy and so on, in the film you will see that even if he doesn't win, he is the antihero of the story, and he is the one you identify with, so not all my stories necessarily have such a positive message. Some are simply fun. Others have a sadder message. For example, there is one about paper dolls (The Paper Dolls) in which they cut them up at the end. Well, they don't disappear completely because they stay in the girl's mind, who remembers them, and it's a story about grief. I think that, as an author, one has to write what one wants, and not think about books with that Victorian mentality of “I'm going to write so that little ones behave like good children.” Among other things, because it doesn't work.

But there are many parents who love that approach, I think parents like it more than children. When I met with my publisher in China, they were determined that I recommend books with very clear morals, because they wanted books that educated children very well. And I think no, that it is more important for children to be able to develop their imagination, to have contact with very different characters and with whom they can identify and develop that empathy. For example, if you have children who live in cities, books about life in the countryside are good for them, so that they get the idea of ​​what it is like to live there, or books about characters to whom things happen like those that happen to them, so that they can understand those feelings, or just the opposite, books in which very different things happen to the characters, so that they can also understand realities and circumstances other than their own. I think books help children develop and foster their imagination, but we greatly limit them if we only write books for them with messages like: “share your candy.”

In addition, we must keep in mind that through books children learn new words; reading allows them to expand their vocabulary considerably. And when parents read aloud to children, stories allow that experience to be shared between parents and children and parents learn a lot from their children at that moment. For example, when you read to your child you see when the child laughs, or if the story is sad, you can share that sadness with him. Shared reading brings parents and children together.

SP: And how do you see the relationship of today's children with new technologies and screens? I guess it won't be very strict, since her professional origins are in television...

JD: It's actually like what you would tell any adult on this topic: everything in moderation can't hurt. And in fact, we adults could set a much better example in this matter because we spend our lives with our noses glued to a screen. And there's nothing wrong with it, either. A good movie is a worthwhile experience.

SP: Where do your stories come from and what is your work process like?

JD: When children ask me that question I usually tell them: choose a book and I will tell you the story of that story. But to give an example, my last book published with Axel in the United Kingdom, The Ugly Five, is about animals in Africa, and was born from a safari we did there. In this case, not only the idea, but almost the entire plot arose there, in the moment. Other times it takes me much longer to imagine the entire plot before I start writing. Once I start, the process can take several weeks because I focus a lot on structure. It matters to me that if it is in verse all the verses have the same length, that if there are several animals they all have their space and time to be an individualized animal in the story. And once it is written, I give it to my husband to read it aloud. And as I listen to it I see if it gets stuck at any point or doesn't sound good and I have to make some changes to make it sound better.

SP: Almost all of your books are dedicated to someone specific: a school, a boy, a girl... Do they come before or after? Do they inspire the story or do you discover after writing it that it ‘fits’ a child?

JD: It depends on each book. The Gruffalo, for example, is dedicated to a school. And it's because I had already written the story, but when I sent it to the publisher it seemed like it was going to stay in a drawer, and that it was never going to be published. And while we were waiting for it to be published, we paid a visit to a school, in a small town, and I told them the story of The Gruffalo. And they loved it, they began to draw how they imagined it, some even wrote me a sequel, a second part of the first book I published, ASquash and a Squeeze, and it was such a fantastic experience that I promised them that if the Gruffalo was ever published, I would dedicate it to them. But it depends a lot. For example, one of the books that will be published next year in the United Kingdom, called The Cook and the King, is dedicated to my son and his daughter because this is a story that I heard my son tell to the girl, and I decided to take it, add things, change others and make it rhyme.

We could spend hours talking to Julia Donaldson. His slow conversation, full of ellipses, rocks you sweetly. You start a sentence and change it midway, or stop to rethink how you continue. You can tell he cares about words. Speak precisely, make yourself understood. But she has spent some very intense days in Madrid, she is exhausted and a final adventure awaits her. "I have to go to a flamenco dinner. It's possible that the idea for the next story will come from this experience," he smiles mischievously.

In addition to the albums, with non-rhyming text (it is not easy to reproduce Donaldson's sound in other languages), the activity books and the books for babies, Bruño has published an appealing gift box that includes El Grúfalo and La Hija del Grúfalo in rhymed edition, square format and cardboard. Surely it is present in many birthdays and letters to the Three Wise Men.

From here we encourage you to explore the world of this author beyond the Gruffalo Forest in bookstores and libraries. You can learn more about Julia Donaldson on her website.