Board Book Favourites Pack Award-winning team Pack by Allan Ahlberg (author), Lynley Dodd (author), Julia Donaldson (author), Sam McBratney (author), and Jill Murphy (author)

Allan has been delighting children of all ages for more than thirty years. Classic characters like Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman have become firm favourites with a generation of children who are now reading them to their own offspring. Innovative, funny and moving, his work encompasses storybooks, picture books, easy readers, joke books and novels as well as poems.

Many of his books were collaborations with his wife, Janet, an illustrator, and they quickly became one of Britain’s leading author/illustrator teams.

Influenced by comics and cartoons, their perfect partnership went on to produce masterpieces including Peepo!, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Baby’s Catalogue.

Janet sadly died in 1994, but Allan has gone on to work with other illustrators and is still producing lots of new books.

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs.”

Jill Murphy was born in London in 1949. From a very early age she was drawing and writing stories. “My earliest memory (my mum tells me I was two), is sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by sheets of drawings.” By the age of six she was stapling her own little storybooks together.

Jill went to a strict convent, and left at sixteen to attend both Chelsea and Croydon art schools. At only eighteen she finished her first novel, The Worst Witch, which was based heavily on her own experiences at the convent school. Three big London publishers turned it down so Jill put it in a drawer and went off to work in a children’s home and as a nanny.

When Jill was twenty four, The Worst Witch was finally published, and was an instant best-seller. Jill became a freelance author and illustrator and many more wonderful books followed. Mildred Hubble has gone on to several more adventures, most recently The Worst Witch and the Wishing Star, and even her own TV show. The Large Family stories are Jill’s other best known stories, picture books telling of the domestic chaos of a family of elephants.

She now lives in Cornwall with her son Charlie.