Lauren Child

Image from Little London Magazine HERE

Another in a series of posts about popular children's authors and their books.

Lauren Child was born in 1967 and grew up in Wiltshire, the middle child of three sisters and the daughter of teachers. Her first creative act was to change her name from Helen to Lauren when she was a child - "I just didn't like my name very much, I didn't dislike the name itself, I just didn't like me being called it."

Lauren studied Art at Manchester Polytechnic and London Art School, after wards she worked in a variety of jobs. She also started her own company making exotic lampshades. The turning point came after talking to a business manager who suggested she should write a children's book and design a product range around it.  The result was Clarice Bean. 

Her first book Clarice Bean, That’s Me, was published in 1999, and was the first of many books about this character. It took her five years to get it published, after many rejections, but after publication it was highly praised and shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Although Clarice Bean started life as a picture-book character, Lauren has now written several novels about her adventures too.  Alongside the Clarice Bean series, Lauren Child also began another series of picture books in 2000, about a brother and sister called Charlie and Lola. This series, which began with the award-winning I Will Not Ever, NEVER Eat A Tomato, has proved even more popular than Clarice Bean.

Lauren Child is also an illustrator, her humorous illustrations contain several mediums including magazine cuttings, collage, material, photography and watercolour. As well as illustrating her own books Lauren has also illustrated books by other author's.

Lauren has won a number of prizes and awards for books in the Clarice Bean and the Charlie and Lola series as well as several of her stand alone titles.

Books by Lauren Child we have in our library: Goldilocks and the Three Bears - a Picture Book, and copies of Utterly Me, Clarice Bean; Clarice Bean Spells Trouble and Clarice Bean, Don't Look Now in the Fiction section. 

Upper Hutt Library currently holds copies of 40 children's books by Lauren Child and three Children's DVDs.

Most of the above information about Lauren Child was adapted from here, here, and here.

For more information about Lauren Child and her books visit the Official Lauren Child website.