Chris Riddell is a children's book illustrator and writer. He has won the Kate Greenaway medal twice and has been shortlisted again this year for his illustrations in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Chris has recently redrawn the pictures for a new edition of an old story of his called Mr Underbed.
What does Mr Underbed do?
Mr Underbed is about my childhood fear of something being under my bed and as a child lying there under the covers thinking I don't want to look just in case there is. So I thought I would write about something to reassure a child by doing a picture book where in fact there is something under the bed but he's benign and rather lovely and what ensues is a comforting story, I hope.
How do you put a story together with the pictures?
It often starts in notebooks and I keep sketch books obsessively. If a character crops up in a sketch book I often want to imagine what story they might have.
Is there anyone who was really important to you as you were entering your profession?
There have been a number of mentors - my tutor at Brighton Arts School was Raymond Briggs and he was wonderfully influential and encouraging and I think it's because of Raymond that I went into children's books.
As a child did you ever imagine that you would end up doing this job?
As a child I loved books and I did know that books had pictures to them but I didn't know that was someone's job. I think one of the major breakthroughs was to discover as a student that there was a job called an illustrator. I still sometimes stop and think this isn't a real job and someone's going to come and tap me on the shoulder and say "go and get a proper job", but it hasn't happened yet so I'm very happy about that.