Love Literacy: exclusive Q&A with Cressida Cowell

March 18th 2016

Here at Peters, we're counting down until Tuesday 19th April 2016, when we'll be holding our Love Literacy event in the beautiful Botanical Gardens of Birmingham. The Love Literacy event has been launched to inspire you and your peers, and will feature plenty of helpful workshops, presentations and talks by literary speakers and authors. One of those authors is Cressida Cowell, world-renowned author of hit novel, How to Train Your Dragon. To celebrate Cressida's presence at Love Literacy, we caught up to quiz her on all things dragons, children's literature and writing.  

Peters: What made you decide to start writing about dragons?

Cressida: I was always an imaginative child. I chose Vikings and Dragons because books were inspired by the summers I spent as a child on a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. This area was, man, many hundreds of years ago, the first place the Vikings came to when they invaded Great Britain, and the last place they left. The island had no roads, houses or electricity, and I used to imagine that there were dragons living in the caves in the cliffs. (Did you know that Vikings believed in Dragons?) In the evening, my father told us tales of the Vikings who invaded this island Archipelago twelve hundred years before, of the quarrelsome Tribes who fought and tricked each other, and of the legends of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs. Also, I just really, really wanted to ride a Dragon, even if it was only inside my own books.

P: As author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series, what comes first when you are creating characters – the illustration or the descriptive text?

C: This is a tricky one. I am going to cheat and say neither – a map is how I start. Many of my classic favourites – Treasure Island, for example – start with a map, because you can begin to create the world your characters live in. I then tend to write, then do the illustrations afterwards, but if I get stuck often a sketch helps…

P: We’re very excited to see you at our Love Literacy 2016 event. Can you give us a sneak preview of what you will be covering in your keynote talk?

C: I’m going to start with saying a big THANK YOU to all literacy advocates who are there. They’re on the front lines of enthusing the next generation of readers and creators. I’m then going to outline a few of the ways I try and make my books accessible and exciting to readers, and why I believe that even books for the age group I write for can ask big, important questions about the world we live in.

P: Why do you think literacy and reading is so important, for children especially?

C: For SO many reasons. I’ve been an Ambassador for the National Literacy Trust for over ten years, and every study done has shown not just the importance of reading for pleasure, but for its absolutely NECESSITY for our society. Reading can, and does change lives – the research is overwhelming. Reading is also vital for the development of empathy – I love films and telly but the action is taking place out there, not in your head. When you’re reading War Horse, you ARE Private Peaceful, on the Front; to paraphrase To Kill a Mockingbird, reading helps you get inside someone else’s skin.  I am passionately fighting for the survival of books as a medium because of what I believe is the unique capacity of books for awakening empathy and creative thinking.

Can't wait for Love Literacy 2016? Learn all about our exciting event on our site.