Louise Yates: Winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2010 (ages 0-6 category)

Congratulations! How do you feel?

It just feels fantastic. It was a huge surprise, I really wasn’t expecting it. Just to be nominated was a huge surprise. I very rarely dance around the room, but it did make me dance around the room when I heard I was nominated so you can imagine how I feel now. I’m very pleased.

Dog Loves Books is only your second book and it’s also been nominated for the Kate Greenaway Award – you must be delighted!

Yes I’m really really chuffed.

Dog Loves Books is set in a bookshop. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind it – was it based on your own experience of working in a bookshop?

Yes, it was. I used to work in an antiquated bookshop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road in London. There were all kinds of rare books in there, it was thriving but quite specialist and the customers were few and far between. I used to long to read the books and really enjoy myself, but I was there to watch out for customers. So this book was born out of that desire to be reading and knowing I shouldn’t be seen to be reading. That was where the idea came from.

I’d done some drawings of my parents in-laws’ dog, and I had an idea for a dog character. At first the idea was for a series of dog walks, with Dog walking with different literary figures, like Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf was one of the more ambitious ones. When I talked about it with my editor they loved the character but we needed to adapt the idea slightly for younger children, so it turned into a story of a dog owning a bookshop and all the frustrations that that involved.

This has made it appeal to the independent booksellers market, they have been fantastically supportive of it in the UK and in the States, I think because they identify with Dog’s frustrations and passions.

It’s also all about sharing books, as Dog wants to share his books. What about libraries and book sharing?

Libraries are incredibly important as is sharing one's own books. My life has been very enriched by recommendations.

How would you feel about your work being enhanced as an e-book or app?

Well that’s something I would love to embrace. I don’t think traditional books and e-books should be mutually exclusive, I would love to work on different platforms with my Dog character. I could imagine Dog Loves Books working very well as an interactive book, with Dog as a type of avatar for kids to help them explore books.

The digital world can reinforce traditional books, I think the two could work very well together. I would hate to see the loss of actual paper books though, because I have a passion for the physical object.

Who are your key influences as a writer and illustrator? You mentioned Quentin Blake.

Yes, Quentin Blake is a very early influence, just from reading Roald Dahl’s books. You know I came to Quentin Blake through Roald Dahl, it’s hard to know who comes first with those two. Also Tenniel who did the Alice in Wonderland illustrations and E H Shepard were a huge influence. I do love those old, very classical children’s illustrations.

Quentin Blake introduced me to Edward Bawden and to Edward Ardizzone who I hadn’t come across before. That was very inspiring and made me realise the scope for illustration to move into the fine art world where you can get a fair deal of realism as well as characterised animation in children’s illustration. I would like to ally those worlds in the future. If I haven’t done it yet, I have to get better really. I think you have to learn on the job.

It’s great to be published at the same time.

Yes it’s quite nerve racking as you sometimes don’t feel 100% happy that your work is ready to be published. But I think this is just natural and every artist has that feeling of not wanting to let it out there in the public sphere until it’s perfect. I love the pace of illustrating books as you are forced to get it out to whatever critical acclaim it’s going to get. I’m very pleased it’s going well at the moment.

Tell us a bit about your relationship with your designer and editor.

I work with both of them very closely; they cross over quite a bit. I think that my editor is very artistically talented and has a good eye for what is going on in the illustration, and my designer often checks in about the wording and phrasing of things. So I work very closely with them both and they were instrumental to Dog Loves Books as it was in a different form when I first brought it to them and we talked quite a bit about how the story should go.

I think that I have a good deal of creative freedom with them, I feel it’s a very good collaborative process because they know what works well in the market place and they have a huge experience of working with other illustrators. They are also very good at managing me in terms of getting my work to a level that we are all pleased with. They are very important.

What medium do you use? Is it etching and watercolour?

No it’s not. I do love etching and the idea for it came from etching, but it would be too long-winded a process and too expensive I think to do everything as an etching.

I discovered that if I drew the line and scanned it into a computer I could work with the line separate to the colour. Then what I did is a bit like etching, in that you have to register the colour and the line separately, but I print the line onto a piece of paper and I put that on a light box and on the top I put a piece of blank watercolour paper that’s exactly the same size and when the light shines through I can see the line.

Then I paint the watercolour and wait for that to dry, then I print the line over the top so everything is hand-drawn and hand-painted, it’s not digitally done but it is processed through the computer to keep the line and watercolour separate.

I did that really partly because every time I was drawing things I tended to mess them up by adding the colour. I wasn’t proficient enough not to mess up my own drawing, so I thought if I keep them separate then once I’ve got the line as I want it I can mess around with the colour as much as I want. I want to learn to paint basically.

They (Random House) are waiting to take you to a celebratory lunch, you must be starving! Congratulations again and thank you for your time.