A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

My dad never decided what he wanted to do; at times he fought in the army, was a teacher, a boxer, a light engineer, and a then a publican. My mum was a traditional housewife and mother. They showed my brother and I unconditional love.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older.