I grew up in London, close to Richmond Park – a beautiful deer park big enough to get lost in, where I got to know lots of the animal characters who have since popped up in my stories. I now live in Warwickshire, surrounded by wildlife-filled woods and meadows. 

I have always loved writing poetry - my mum, aunt and granny all wrote ridiculous poems to commemorate family events, so I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a tendency to think in rhyme. I enjoy the sound and rhythm of words, and the first things I published were poems. 

When I had children I started writing stories and my children gave me lots of ideas. Fred and the Little Egg was written when one of them had a phase of “hatching” anything remotely egg-shaped, and the early Fletcher books were inspired by things we did together.