Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson: Reading my book to sick children left me so tearful

Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson today told how reading her new book to sick children at a London hospital made her “quite tearful”.

Her husband Malcolm, a retired paediatrician, was a junior doctor at Evelina London children’s hospital when it was based at Guy’s hospital. Last week the couple visited its new home, beside St Thomas’s hospital in Lambeth, to launch Zog And The Flying Doctors.

Donaldson, the UK’s bestselling author, said: “I got such a lovely feeling here. Because of everything wrong in the world, when you come to a place where everyone seems to care what they are doing and the atmosphere just seems — obviously not totally happy as children have serious illnesses — but as happy as can be in the circumstances. I was very impressed by the [hospital] school. That was amazing. When I wrote the story, though it’s got doctors in it, it was quite frivolous.

“Doing the story about doctors and patients in a children’s hospital, and there were doctors and patients there, really brought it alive. It made me feel quite tearful actually, doing a story about doctors in this setting.” Zog And The Flying Doctors is a follow-up to 2010’s Zog, which has sold 1.5 million copies. In the new tale, Zog the dragon becomes an “air ambulance” for Princess Pearl and Sir Gadabout.

Donaldson, 67, a former children’s laureate, said: “Some people think I started off with a feminist thing, because it is quite a feminist book because Princess Pearl doesn’t want to be just a princess, she wants to be out in the world doing a good job and helping people. That is what the book has come to be about, but it wasn’t my starting point.”

Anne Hamilton, headteacher of Evelina hospital school, said it had been working with the charity Readathon, which organised Donaldson’s visit, for three years.

“Books come brand new and an author comes every half term,” she said. “This is creative, exciting, and it changes how the children negotiate with the pain they have and the treatment they are going through.”

A giant mural, by Gruffalo and Zog illustrator Axel Scheffler, has also been installed in the hospital. Marian Ridley, director of Evelina London, said: “Going to theatre will become ‘Come and see Zog’. It gives anxious parents something they can distract their child with.”