Susannah Lloyd - Interview (August 2026)
Q: What was your best school visit, and why?
It was during a recent one in Bradford arranged by the Literacy Trust as part of their Libraries For Schools Project. I was working with a group of year three children who were generating lots of ideas for their own stories. One girl told me that she was going to always remember that day, when she had grown up and was an author too. That is the best feeling in the world. I believe her too - her ideas were fantastic. I learnt so much about how to write, by making similar stories at that same age.
Q: Your books often feature "VERY unreliable narrators", why are you drawn to characters who get things wrong?
I have a great fondness for blunderers and scoundrels, and I love to write about them in ways that leaves plenty of room in between the lines for the reader to work out what is really going on. I think this is especially fun in a read aloud book, where the adult reading the words appears to be not nearly as clued up as the child who has just noticed something is up! Film Director Ernst Lubitsch apparently once said: "Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever." I feel like that applies equally to readers!
Q: In Badgers Are Go!, the plot involves a lot of cheese and tomato sandwiches. Do you have a favourite writing snack?
A bag of hula hoops and a penguin biscuit is my writing fuel of choice, often pilfered from my children’s lunch box supplies. Although the humans eat lots of cheese and tomato sandwiches in the Badgers Are Go books, the badgers and the moles have a wide variety of delicious puddings and snacks on their menu. Unfortunately they all involve something squishy, like Cricket à la Crème, and Triple Treacle Worm Surprise.
Q: If you were in charge of a library, what one book would you insist is on the shelves, and why?
Lots of copies of The Wolf, The Duck and The Mouse by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, in which a mouse gets eaten by a wolf and ends up having the most wonderful time in there. It is very playful and has lots of great lines to read out loud, like 'Oh woe!' and 'I may have been swallowed, but I have no intention of being eaten.'
Q: Your author workshops often celebrate the power of daydreaming, how do you find the time to daydream?
Rebecca Solnit wrote that the mind works at its best at three miles an hour and a lot of my own writing ideas tend to come when I’m walking. I’ll be walking along, with a totally blank mind, and all of a sudden some characters will start talking to each other in my head, and I have to stop, grab my notebook, and scribble it all down before all that chatter evaporates. Bus and train journeys are also brilliant – staring out the window, with nothing in particular to do. I like to talk to kids about that particularly wonderful floaty state of mind that is daydreaming. You learn a lot about how to concentrate in school, but you learn a lot less about its opposite! For me, daydreaming is key to generating ideas, and without a new shiny idea that you love, there isn’t really a motivation to start writing. Being asked to write with a blank page in front of you is intimidating for writers of any age, including me! A lot of my workshops are about helping children find that one idea which is theirs alone, and which gets them excited to start writing.
Q: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had, and did it teach you anything useful for your writing?
As a teenager, I had a summer job in a café and was in charge of mixing a massive bucket of tuna with a vast bucket of mayo at 6am, before the morning sandwich rush. I think I did this with huge rubber gloves on. I have had a dread aversion to tuna to this day. This taught me that a person’s sense of horror can be enhanced by large sizes! In Badger Are Go – Revenge of the Claw, evil mastermind The Velvet Claw uses his Advanced Villainy skills to make a plot for all of humanity and badgerdom to hurtle themselves headfirst into vats of custard, that are so big they are visible from space.
Q: Your books have now been translated into multiple languages, what is your favourite translation?
I love the title of Ich War’s Nicht! (It Wasn’t Me!, the German Who Ate Steve) All the tellings off that Marcel receives sound great in German, like “Marcel! Das ist mein letzte warnung!”
In my Here Be books (Here Be Dragons and Here Be Giants) the main character is a knight who speaks in a flamboyantly medieval fashion, with lots of verilys, perchances and forsooths sprinkled in. I love to find out how that way of talking sounds in Turkish, or Hungarian, or Brazilian Portuguese. I now know how to say ‘Egads’ in 12 different languages!
Q: You are based in West Yorkshire, what is the best thing about the place you live?
I love Bradford, particularly its libraries and primary schools, which have a uniquely vibrant energy to them. The Bradford Waterstones is the most beautiful bookshop in Britain, in my opinion, based in an old wool exchange. I live near a very pretty Victorian mill area called Saltaire, and I love all things Victorian. There are lots of grand statues of lions and men with fantastic beards. The mill is now filled with galleries and shops, including another brilliant bookshop with a wonderful children’s section. I have learned a lot about writing by reading my way through the selection of books there. I love quirky museums, and there is one in nearby Keighley with an eccentric mix of stuffed animals and fossils. They have a framed Victorian display of weevils called 'Weevils of Keighley' which makes me think of a teeny tiny football team. I imagine them beating all the odds to win a championship.
Q: During school visits, what is the most memorable question a child has ever asked you?
But I frequently get asked if I am in fact a secret badger operative myself, due to children’s suspicions about how much I seem to know about highly confidential top secret badgerly secrets in Badgers Are Go. However, my favourite question was on the topic of silly ideas, and it was 'Would you rather your nose was made out of jelly, or your jelly was made out of noses?'
Q: If you could step into the world of one of your own books for a day, which one would you choose?
I would go to the party in A Terribly Friendly Fox, and play all the party games. But I would be very careful not to get too close to the fox, just in case I ended up as a party snack.
Q: When are you going to get balalaika lessons?
Ah yes! My favourite childhood picture book was Trubloff, the Mouse Who Wanted to Play the Ballalaika, by John Burningham. I understood Trubloff’s longing, and wanted to learn to play too but alas, I still have not started! Trubloff had to travel through the bitter and frozen wastes of an Eastern European country to find the right teachers, so I guess I will have to as well.
Q: What are you working on next?
I am trying my hand at something completely new - writing comics. I am loving it so far, and cannot wait to share what I have learned with children on visits.