A life in books: Lauren Child

On the morning of her 30th birthday, Lauren Child woke up in her best friend's bed, which she was sharing for want of one of her own, and decided things had to change. After a fitful, frustrating university career (a "disastrous" year studying art at Manchester; a disappointing mixed media course at City and Guilds) she spent her 20s "floundering dreadfully", living hand-to-mouth in London "doing the odd mural, painting china and selling it. I felt," she says, "very lost." As a teenager, she'd "always imagined by the time I was 30 I'd have a fantastic career, a house, a husband – that sports-car image of your life. But that morning I was faced with the horrible reality. I thought, look at me! It was deeply depressing, but it woke me up. I realised I had to pull it together."

That was in 1995. Four years later Clarice Bean, That's Me – the first of Child's tales of malapropic Clarice and her rumpled, bohemian family – was published. She followed it up in 2000 with I Will Not Ever NEVER Eat a Tomato, featuring redoubtable brother-and-sister team Charlie and Lola. The book won the Kate Greenaway medal, and Child's stories of long-suffering Charlie and his "small and very funny" sister Lola went on to sell in their millions; the characters have also been adapted, with Child in the role of executive producer, for the BBC. In the decade since, she has become, in the words of the Guardian's children's editor Julia Eccleshare, "a star in the picture-book world": her tales have become bookcase staples; she is to the current generation of children what Shirley Hughes was in the 1970s, and Janet and Alan Ahlberg in the 80s. But if her own story sounds Cinderella-simple – young woman struggles with world, discovers vocation and succeeds beyond her wildest dreams – well, you've been reading too many fairytales. In the end, her career in children's books came about almost by accident. "I was just desperately feeling around for things to do," she says now. "I knew I was interested in furniture, in product design, in children's film and animation, in textiles, in loads of things – but I couldn't see any pattern. I was lashing out, really."

For all the surface brio of illustrations that are crammed full of everything from photographs to fabric scraps, in person, Child remains as tentative as her books are bold, as hesitant of her success as her characters, with their crimped mouths and vast, wary eyes, appear to be of their exuberant environments. Clarice Bean came into being on the advice of a successful friend-of-a-friend who saw Child's portfolio and suggested that a children's book would "be a way of showing I could come up with characters and design a world for them. So I wrote Clarice Bean not as an exercise in becoming a children's writer, but as a calling-card to show to a director. When I started, I was thinking of it as a film." Nevertheless, the book was eventually taken on by children's publisher Orchard – and the rest is history. "I didn't ever want to be a children's writer, that's for sure, and I didn't even plan to be a children's illustrator," Child confesses, with something like bemusement. "But it seemed to be working, so I thought: enjoy it. And I began to really enjoy it."

Child was born in Berkshire, the second of three sisters. Her first creative act was to change her name from Helen to Lauren when she was a child – a decision she describes with typical diffidence. "People always think it's incredibly significant. It isn't: I just didn't like my name very much. I feel bad about saying that in case people think I dislike the name itself. I don't: I just didn't like me being called it." No surprise, then, that she put a lot of thought into what to call her characters. "I can't start writing a book until I've worked out what the name is. Clarice, for example: I couldn't have given her a regular name. I chose Clarice because it's old-fashioned but quite pretty, and unusual. Her middle name, Bean, was to suggest something about her family: that they're just the other side of conventional. With Charlie and Lola, I wanted to go completely in the opposite direction. Charlie was just a fairly common boy's name I liked; Lola came to me at the time when my friends were settling down." Child, who lives in north London with her partner, a criminal barrister, has no children of her own. "A whole chain of people said to me 'I'm going to call my daughter – or dog – Lola.' I guess I'm saying with Charlie and Lola they're everychild – their stories talk about problems most children can relate to."

In Charlie and Lola's third outing, 2003's I Am Too Absolutely Small for School, Lola's parents decree that she is "nearly quite big enough" to go into the classroom. Lola raises a series of objections: the uniform; the curriculum; school dinners, which she doesn't want to eat "alone, all by myself, on my own". In the book, of course, Charlie is on hand to reassure her and Lola ends up having a high old time, afterwards pinning her initial reluctance on her invisible friend, the can-carrying Soren Lorenson (rendered in the books in clear, raised plastic, so children can catch a glimpse of him when the light's right). But for Child herself, things didn't go quite so smoothly. Soon after she passed school age, her father, who had been teaching art at Downe House, was offered a job at Marlborough College, over the county border in Wiltshire. "We'd been living in this little village and suddenly we were in what felt like a vast metropolis," she remembers. "In fact, it wasn't a big move, but it felt enormous – shocking! I moved from my tiny village school to an infant school in the town, and I just found it overwhelming." Her parents picked up quickly on her misery and moved her after a term, but the scars clearly run deep, and go some way to explaining, perhaps, why her books focus so firmly on small, solvable problems: how to put off bedtime; what to do if you don't like mashed potato.

Child is modest about her early talents ("I wasn't the best drawer in the world, hardly child-prodigy standard"). But her father encouraged her interest in art and her mother, meanwhile, made sure there were plenty of books about the house, and inadvertently stoked a fascination with Americana still visible in her artwork today. "I was obsessed!" Child grins. "And crazy as it sounds, it was all down to Alistair Cooke. My mum was really into him – I watched his documentary series with her, and we'd always listen to Letter from America on the radio. Their sitcoms made ours seem lacklustre in comparison. And the films! When I was a child, English films so often seemed to be about the dreary, hard-slog side of life, whereas you'd watch The Philadelphia Story, and it was endless glamour: the stories were overblown and exciting, the costumes and sets were glorious."

That sense of celluloid sumptuousness is tangibly present in 2005's standalone Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent, which tells the story of "child genius" Hubert and his "frightfully, frightfully rich" parents, flighty socialites who own mansions in London and Milan and a "swankily swell house in New York". The book, the cover of which ripples with the watermark from a dollar bill, was, Child says, "greatly influence by films such as High Society. I used to love those films because they showed the best side of being madly rich: the frivolity and romance. I thought it would be fun to write about someone who had all of those magical assets." Unfortunately, Hubert's parents' penchant for entertaining is such that, despite his best efforts, they end up blowing the lot, and Hubert has no choice but to move the family into a modest apartment building overlooking a spiky, Chicagoan skyline. But the book's ending is happy: Hubert's mother is thrilled to find that, with so many neighbours, there's "always someone available for a game of KerPlunk", his father embarks on "a career as a doorman, a job perfectly suited to his social skills", and Hubert realises that "being frightfully, frightfully rich was not frightfully important to his parents, after all".

"That's got a bit to do with my older sister," Child explains. "She was one of those very responsible children, always worrying that my parents weren't quite grown up enough. On one occasion, when the tax disc had fallen off the windscreen, she became hysterical because she thought my mother would be arrested. In the end my mother had to stop the car and stick it back on with Green Shield stamps. Hubert is that kind of child: he's trying to protect his parents and he can't, just as parents can't really protect children from terrible things that might happen. But I wanted the book to end well to show children like that – the worriers – that things can work out."

For Child, after her landmark birthday, the first step towards working things out involved taking a job painting spots for Damien Hirst, who was then deep in his spotty phase. It was, she says now, "a fantastic turning point". Although she only met Hirst himself a handful of times, she remains "ever grateful. The job wasn't glamorous by any means: it was a nine-hour day in a cold studio, just painting circles. But it allowed me to earn some money in the field I wanted to be in; it pulled me out of the doldrums. I'd listen to the radio all day and think about things I was writing. It gave me a place to be while I was waiting for things to happen."

By this point she had written Clarice Bean, but while publishers were intrigued, none was prepared to take a risk. "One said: 'You can't write a book for children in the first person, they don't understand it.' I knew that was rubbish. Another said: 'Either have lovely pictures and keep the text minimal, or keep the text and have simple drawings.' They all seemed to agree that I shouldn't have the text interrupting the pictures, as I do. But I thought, no: I'd rather it never got published than make radical changes. So I sat on it for a long time. That was very hard: I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done, and I thought, if no one wants this, I don't know what I can do."

What she did, in fact, was start a lampshade company with a friend, the actor Andrew St Clair, called, splendidly, Chandeliers for the People. "We'd been looking for interesting lampshades and hadn't been able to find any," she explains. "So while I was waiting for my book to be published and he was waiting for acting jobs, we decided we'd make some: beautiful lampshades at affordable prices. It was a great little dream." The dream, alas, foundered, but the lampshades live on virtually in the pages of Child's books, in which lampshades are notably plentiful and opulent.

In the end, Child went back to the drawing board and produced a "very simple" book called I Want a Pet. The publisher Frances Lincoln took it on – "and once one person has taken an interest, it encourages others to take a chance on you, too. It was the pebble that started the avalanche." On the heels of her first deal, Orchard bought Clarice Bean, That's Me, and signed Child up for two more books. "It sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish, but I think the earlier struggle was good for me," she says. "Because I'd spent my 20s failing, when things started to go well, I wasn't glib about it. I understood that they were going well."

Prizes came thick and fast: as well as winning the Kate Greenaway medal for I Will Not Ever NEVER Eat a Tomato, Child won the Nestlé Smarties bronze award for 2000's Beware of the Storybook Wolves, won it again in 2001 for What Planet Are You From, Clarice Bean? and in 2002 took the Nestlé Smarties gold award for That Pesky Rat, about an unloved rodent longing for a place and owner of his own. Her books capture the peculiar grandiloquence of children's speech; the ornate sentences, stippled with adverbs like raisins in a cake. "I think it's just down to listening," she says, of her ability to capture children's voices. "The way children speak is just a bit more exaggerated: they're using words for the first time, without knowing exactly what they mean, and they're excited by them. Tell them a new word and they'll use it immediately. As we get older, we end up with a vocabulary we use because we feel confident about it. Children just carry on piling it in." Her luscious, textural pictures (she cites Ronald Searle, Quentin Blake and Edward Gorey as influences), establish her books as covetable objects in their own right. She finds her materials "everywhere. I save everything: envelopes because of the patterns they have inside; fabric from my childhood and from jumble sales. I've bought clothes because I thought the print would work in a picture. And I collect objects, too, because I use photographs so often – glasses are really useful, as are plates. My house is crammed with stuff; I'm busting out of it. I try to make files of pictures and textures, but that's a lot of work in itself! I could take a year off and spend it filing."

This year is Charlie and Lola's 10th birthday. Slightly Invisible, their fourth adventure, is out this month, and will satisfy parents who've been longing for Charlie's Job-like patience with his recalcitrant younger sister to run out. The spark for the tale, which tells of Lola's quest to make Charlie and his friend Marv play with her, came to Child during "a talk in a school a few years ago. This boy put his hand up and said 'Have you ever thought about writing a book where Charlie actually gets annoyed with Lola?' I said, you're so right, he's ridiculously tolerant. And I didn't want him just to come across as a goody-goody. So I decided to write something where he loses it a bit. She is annoying!"

Next up is something completely different. Child is writing a series of "spoof detective" novels for nine- to 13-year-olds, featuring Clarice Bean's favourite sleuth, Ruby Redfort – and this time, there are no illustrations at all. She is now, undeniably, a children's writer. "It's very strange," she agrees. "Although, funnily enough, these books above all my others link into those films I loved as a child; in a way, they came out of them, and American children's TV. It's an odd circle. It still doesn't feel like writing a book, really. I'm still seeing it as pictures in my head."