Catherine Rayner

 My name is Catherine Rayner, and I’m a children’s author and illustrator and an artist. I have always loved art and stories since I was very, very little. As long as I can remember, I have been able to get completely immersed inside a book. I think from being teeny tiny I used to make my own books. I used to write and illustrate them and make them out of little scraps of paper and sellotape them together, and it’s something that continued into my twenties when I went to art school in Edinburgh and studied illustration. As well as it being a lifelong dream to be a writer and an illustrator, it was also something that I was prepared to work very, very hard to do. In my final year at art school, I got very obsessed and fascinated with drawing tigers, and we were lucky enough to live quite near Edinburgh Zoo. So, I used to get the bus out there and sit and draw the tigers for hours and hours on end. And I had sketchbooks full of tigers and I decided that I wanted to do a book about them, but I didn’t have a story. So, I just kept painting, and I realized that they all looked quite sad, which was such a shame really. But when my tutor asked me why they all looked so sad, I said, because they’ve lost their smiles. And that was the germ for the very first story that I ever wrote and illustrated called Augustus and His Smile. So, I then started to do a draft of the story and for my final degree show project, I made the whole book. It was all painted in watercolour with silkscreen-printed backgrounds and inky loose drawings of tigers on top. And it ended up being taken and published by a publisher called Little Tiger Press. I thought it was a joke at first when they said they wanted it, but it turned out to be true, and that was the start of my career. I’ve now done 25 books, and they’ve been translated into nearly 30 languages, 2 million copies sold worldwide, and I’m currently writing my 26th.