Children's Books

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler are the names behind such children's classics as The Gruffalo , Stick Man , Zog and - my personal favourite - The Highway Rat . This year they mark the 15th anniversary of their first collaboration, Gruffalo.

"The strange thing is that when the 10-year anniversary came up, it seemed we had been working for ages," author Donaldson says, "but now that seems like yesterday and the last years have shot past in a blur."

Before they started working together, Donaldson wrote songs for the BBC, something that became increasingly difficult: "They wanted songs about things they could not write themselves, like one on a global history of guitars, and they always commissioned the lowest tender."

The BBC had issued a recording of some of her earliest, including A Squash and a Squeeze, which an editor at Macmillan played to her children. The rhyme is catchy and the editor Kate Wilson contacted Donaldson to see if she would consider turning it into a book.

"I played it very coolly," Donaldson says, "as if this sort of thing happened all the time."

Meanwhile, Scheffler, originally from Germany, had been illustrating for five or six years and he was brought in by the publisher.

"I was third choice," Scheffler laments comically.

His style is instantly recognisable, a clever mix of the sophisticated - the way the characters often gaze out, cocking their eyebrows and catching the reader's eye with their own - and the childish, so these eyes are simply rendered dots floating in plain white circles.

To date they have written and illustrated 18 books together. The process is not as collaborative as one might imagine. Donaldson comes up with the story and sends it to Scheffler. He then decides whether he can or can't do it - he has turned her down in the past - and if so, the publisher must find someone else.

Donaldson admits to finding the process nerve-jangling. Will he like it? Neither is willing to say which of Donaldson's many other books they have decided not to work on, for fear of offending the second-choice illustrators. The thought of Scheffler passing on a book does not stop Donaldson from testing him though.

"I set him some terrible problems," she laughs. "He is self-critical, and never happy with what he has done."

Donaldson used to be a busker and is keen on acting out her stories. Scheffler now joins her on stage and though at first he seemed less than comfortable, he now enjoys it just as much as Donaldson. "He plays a wonderful owl," she says.

I inquire about to their future, which seems a bit undecided, in the hope there is something new in the pipeline. Both have been busy with other projects.

Personally, I hope they can just enjoy their anniversary party, during which they will act out the little old lady and the wise old man from A Squash and a Squeeze.