ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

Lauren Child thinks children’s book publishing still gets a bad deal. It’s one of the reasons the best-selling author-illustrator and current Children’s Laureate — her tenure ends this year — is so happy to be a judge for this year Oscar’s Book Prize. “There’s still a lot of snootiness about children’s books. Just look at the teeny-weeny percentage that get reviewed compared to adults. It’s as if there’s a kind of hierarchy.”

Child is best known for her books featuring Clarice Bean, Charlie and Lola (who became a TV series), Ruby Redfort and Hubert Horatio, which together have sold more than five million copies worldwide. In the two decades since we first met quirky, snub-nosed Clarice Bean and her chaotic, trendy family, her legions of original fans have become adults. “The most touching experience in my whole career is talking to grown-ups who tell me what the book meant to them when they were growing up,” says Child, 53. “It’s why I’m so passionate about the idea that children’s book writing and illustrating should get more recognition, and why prizes like Oscar’s Book Prize are so important, because there is so little coverage. We know that a child’s life can be changed by what they read, so why don’t we spend more time thinking about what that material is?”

Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins and The Secret Garden — all of which she has illustrated — were the books that had the most profound effect on Child when she was growing up. “The Secret Garden was a gamechanger because it was about someone who was so hard to like. She was plain, had a horrible expression on her face, was bossy and ungrateful. As a child I felt like her, I felt all of those things. I felt it was me. So for children who might think bad things about themselves, these stories can help let them off the hook. It’s all a drip-drip effect, which is why it’s important we talk about children’s books in a grown-up way, in terms of what they’re about, rather than just saying ‘Isn’t it lovely?’”

As a judge of the prize, she will be on the look-out for new authors and illustrators “with left-field ways of looking at the world”, and would like to see less attention given to commercially successful authors and publishing trends. “We’re great at giving prizes for unusual adults’ books but not so good at praising people who have different ideas about children’s books; things need to be a bit more extraordinary.” Her own trajectory is a great example: Clarice Bean only took off when she stopped trying to please her publishers. “I was young and kept trying to do what they wanted and getting it wrong, so every time I rewrote or redrew something, it would get more dead. It had none of me in it, so quite rightly they rejected it. I actually started writing Clarice Bean as a film and forgot about all the things you need to make a book, and that’s when the publishers suddenly became interested. It’s about the need to reject everything you think they want and find your own voice.”

The current trend for “rebel girl” books is a prime case of bad reactive publishing. “It’s like unicorns, or handwriting — which became so plagiarised. Everyone ends up in this copycat cauldron rather than saying, ‘I want to do this,’ and you can end up with drivel.” She cites Edward Gorey, John Burningham and Quentin Blake as outstanding examples of original thinking and brilliant expression.

At a time when research by the National Literacy Trust finds that one in 11 children and young people in the UK don’t own a book (a figure that rises to one in eight children on free school meals), and that book ownership is one of the highest predictors of reading attainment and mental well-being, champions of literacy are always welcome, especially when they are as influential as Stormzy, she says. Last year he set up his own imprint, #Merky Books, which sits within the William Heinemann imprint at Penguin Random House.

“The fact he’s talked about how much Malorie Blackman’s books meant to him as a child, and the power she had in his life when he needed it, is amazing. He’s such a role model to so many young people, and he’s saying to them, ‘This was important to me, so it could be important to you.’ If we’re to take children seriously and bring about social change, then you have to take note of what they engage with, what might bring them confidence and security and support. People like him make a difference.” While it’s important to hear a voice from a different background, she adds: “I take issue with this idea that middle-class children are all doing extremely nicely and will go far because they’re middle class, because it isn’t true. There’s neglect and unhappiness and any child, whatever their background or family fortunes, can experience feelings of despair and isolation. It’s as if there are tiers of children. But children are children.”

The middle daughter of teacher parents, Child grew up in Wiltshire in a happy family not unlike Clarice Bean’s. Today she lives in north London with her partner, criminal barrister Adrian Darbishire, and their daughter Tuesday, now nearly nine, whom she adopted from Mongolia at the age of two-and-a-half after visiting the country as part of a Unesco project.

“Having Tuesday doesn’t change the way I write or illustrate but it does make me see more than ever how important illustration is. We had no common language when she arrived. But we did have drawing, and she was a natural right from the start, which really helped us communicate. It’s important for children that their drawings are looked at and that it has a wide role in education because it’s about learning to observe and understand, just like creative writing, and having these skills can make you much more empathetic.”

Child is currently working on a new picture book and has plans to revive Clarice Bean, although she hasn’t yet decided what age Clarice will be. In her first book, Clarice Bean, That’s Me, she was seven, and by the sixth and final book she was 11. “She won’t be grown up,” says Child, smiling, “I want to go back to her as she is.” Clarice Bean; that’s her.

Oscar’s Book Prize is now open for submissions. For more information, go to: oscarsbookprize.co.uk