CRESSIDA COWELL INTERVIEW

Cressida Cowell, the new star of children’s fiction, has arrived without any of the fanfare and hype that, post Harry Potter, has become a commonplace of the market. Three years ago she published How To Train Your Dragon, a novel for 7-11 year olds that went on to sell 100,000 copies entirely through word-of-mouth, and is translated into 20 languages. It has now been bought by Dreamworks Animation, the studio that brought us Shrek, and is due for release in 2009.

Irresistibly funny, exciting and endearing, How To Train Your Dragon tells the tale of Hiccup the Useless, a nerdy Viking boy whose gigantic father Stoick the Vast is chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe living on the Isle of Berk. Despised by all the other Vikings, Hiccup is even more wretched when he picks a runty, remorselessly selfish dragon, Toothless, to be his hunting beast. Little does he know this is how he will become a Dragon Whisperer – something that will save his tribe when the monstrous Green Death rises from the sea-bed. Two more equally wonderful Hiccup adventures have followed, with How to Speak Dragonese out this month.

Hiccup’s adventures were inspired by Cowell’s memories of her family holidays on a tiny island in the Inner Hebrides, bought by her father. Cressida, her sister and her younger brother Caspar were taken off to camp on an island which was “just rock and heather”, cut off from the outside world but surrounded by an archipelago of other tiny, uninhabited islands.

“It was a child-sized world which an imaginative child would find easy to imagine other different tribes living on,” she says. Her young and fearless parents did the kind of mad things all too familiar to the Hairy Hooligans, taking the children out sailing in storms. You know immediately you read Cowell’s books that the author has experiences what real cold, fear and peril is like.

“It was wonderful but intense, the kind of place where you might expect to see dragons sailing overhead,” she says. Now a pretty, bespectacled mother of effervescent charm and intelligence, she realised as a child she “might be a different species” from her adored father when holding him by the ankles as he hung upside-down off a cliff to spy on a nest of buzzards.

Back in London, she drew endless archipelagos at St. Paul’s School, becoming obsessed by Vikings and the Dark Ages after inspiring History lessons with an American teacher, Miss Macdonald. Later, despite her love of art leading to a transfer to Marlborough, Cowell read English at Oxford before going to both St. Martin’s art school and Bristol, where she has her first book accepted by Hodder while doing a course in narrative illustration. Eight picture books followed before Hiccup the Viking Who Was Sea-Sick showed her a way of making the jump into novels. The madly funny pictures of Vikings, monsters, raging seas and battles with which her texts are lavished are part of the reason why children adore her books. Like Ronald Searle, she has a wit of line which conceals a penetrating intelligence about how mean and calculating people can be to one another.

Yet Hiccup is also inspired by something much closer to home, which explains its success with reluctant readers (especially boys). Her brother Caspar had a miserable time at the same famous public school where their father was a successful pupil; dismissed academically and reading only comic books, nobody discovered how intelligent he was until he went to university in America, topping a Phd at Princeton with a job as Philosophy Professor at MIT. In academic terms, he made the journey Hiccup is now making to become the Last Viking Hero, whose adventures (“translated from Old Norse”) strike a deep chord in any child who has ever felt intimidated by teachers, peers or indeed parents.

“All boys have this transition to make from little boy into something that to them looks like the Incredible Hulk, with this big body and deep voice,” says Cowell, who has two young daughters and a baby son by her husband, a director of Save the Children. “I try to write from both Hiccup and Stoick’s point of view, because as a parent myself I understand it’s hard for Stoick to realise that his child is different. It’s an awkward moment when you realise love is not just narcissistic. When my daughter Clemmie said her favourite subjects at school were sports and maths, she suddenly felt very alien.”

It was with Caspar in mind that she began to write the Hiccup books at her house in Chsiwick, using not only maps, lists, songs, report cards, blots and drawings, but mixed up typefaces. These are an important factor in keeping a reluctant reader’s attention. Dragons, for instance, speak in wobbly Gothic; Stoick in capital letters; Romans in Romanesque. Like Cowell’s best friend, the children’s author Lauren Child, she uses typography as an art in itself; the audiobooks, brilliantly read by the new Dr. Who, David Tennant, capture these different shifts of voice and tone. Though it looks as if it is thrown off, each book goes through 15 drafts and is a work of real originality and sophistication. Each book builds on the success of the last, both in terms of sales and of an increasingly rich imaginative world in which Ancient Rome has now made an attempt at invasion, only to be beaten off by Hiccup’s genius and the help of tiny, ferocious nanodragons. It’s easy to see why Dreamworks think it will make a great animated film, for just like ‘Shrek’, Cowell has struck the perfect balance between traditional fairytale thrills and post-modern comedy.

But it is the idea of having your own small dragon (“I used to long for one as a child, it’d be the coolest pet in the world”) that most appeals. Her father’s obsession with birds of prey is translated into a series of Top Trumps spoofs solemnly describing different breeds of dragon, and their “fear or fight factor”. Toothless is a “Common or Garden Daydream,” despised by big, sneering Monstrous Nightmares. Yet Toothless becomes Hiccup’s unreliable ally once our hero realises that the Viking advice to SHOUT AT THEM might be less successful than learning to speak Dragonese.

“I like a story with a moral, and I like making readers think,” Cowell says. “The bit in How to Train Your Dragon when Hiccup is talking to the Green Death is actually quite philosophical. My books are about leadership and responsibility, and the kind of history that can’t be pinned down by facts.”

How to Speak Dragonese by Cressida Cowell is published this week by Hodder, £5.99

The Times, November 2005