Children’s authors like Cottrell-Boyce know they have the chance to make the world a better place, every time they write.
Children’s publishing is awash with celebrity authors. So when Frank Cottrell-Boyce was named BookTrust’s Children’s Laureate, some fellow writers may not have been wholly delighted. After all, Cottrell-Boyce is better known by many for his screenwriting work. He has written successful screenplays for a roster of films, including Millions (2004), The Railway Man (2013) and Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017).
He even had a gig at the Olympics, co-creating the opening and closing ceremonies and famously scripting the interplay between Queen Elizabeth II and Daniel Craig’s Bond for the Queen’s entry to the opening ceremony.
But Frank Cottrell-Boyce is no celebrity author. When filmmaker Danny Boyle wrote the introduction for the re-release of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s novel Millions, he began with a question: “How do you make the world a better place?” This question lies at the heart of Cottrell-Boyce’s writing for children. Here are four values of real children’s authors embodied by Cottrell-Boyce, that prove he is thoroughly deserving of the laureate.
Good children’s authors understand how their own work fits into the traditions of children’s literature. Cottrell-Boyce is actively engaged with the children’s authors who have influenced him.
He often speaks, for example, about being inspired by his childhood love for Tove Jansson’s Moomin books. In 2011 he was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to extend the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang series. He wrote the moving film tribute to A.A. Milne, Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), and the screenplay for the recent adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel Kensuke’s Kingdom (1999) in 2023.
He also holds a PhD in English Literature from Keble College, Oxford, showing his understanding of the long conversation of literary texts.
A Telegraph article covering his appointment as children’s laureate relayed the story of a Cottrell-Boyce visit to Glasgow. During the visit, an intimidatingly large child objected to him stopping reading at an exciting point in the book.
Cottrell-Boyce was encouraging the children to read the book for themselves or to begin imagining what might happen next in the story, when the young man said, in a threatening tone: “Just read the book, wee man.”
School visits like these are a means of inspiring reading for pleasure, and real children’s authors are champions of reading. The work they do in school visits isn’t about selling a few books, but about inspiring and extending the reading culture of the school.
It’s hard to overestimate how important childhood reading is for subsequent achievement and happiness. Cottrell-Boyce tells the story of meeting a refugee who knew of a better life because she’d read Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1880).
But we don’t need to rely on anecdotes. There are a plethora of studies and investigations that indicate childhood reading makes us more empathetic, more resilient, gives us greater social mobility, helps us regulate our emotional responses – the list is endless.
BookTrust, the charity behind the appointment of the children’s laureate, publishes a frequently-updated roundup of such studies. Perhaps the most striking of the findings around childhood reading is that child readers “growing up in poverty are less likely to remain in poverty as adults”.
Real children’s authors understand this. Real children’s authors think about readers in poverty or in other bad situations, when they create their fictional worlds.
Amid this responsibility, real children’s authors still manage to write stories of chaotic fun. They remember and express the intense experience of encountering the world and yourself for the first time. They create characters so real that they can become friends for the friendless and guides for those who find life difficult to navigate.
Real children’s authors are hopeful. They know they have the chance to make the world a better place, every time they write.
Our new children’s laureate might be on the flash side, but he is without doubt a real children’s author.
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Mimi Thebo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
