Penguin Huddle by Ross Montgomery
I think many of us are always keen to know where the ideas come from for the stories authors tell. Pneguin Huddle is a cuddle of a story and author Ross Montgomery tells us a bit about the inspiration for this book.
I’m always asked how I came up with an idea for a particular book, and it’s a surprisingly hard question – sometimes, remembering the very first seed of what sets a story off is like an act of excavation. What on earth was I thinking?!
But with PENGUIN HUDDLE – my new picture-book with Sarah Warburton – I know the exact time and place and date where I got the idea.
Picture the scene – me, sitting in a school reception in February 2018, waiting for an assembly to finish so I could start some creative writing workshops with the kids. This was a very sweet, very odd school – to give you an idea, in the assembly hall I could hear the children singing All Star by Smash Mouth. I looked around and saw a framed drawing that a child had done of a penguin, and I thought: wow, there aren’t enough kids’ books about penguins. Penguins are brilliant. The way the walk, the walk they squawk, the way they huddle together to stay warm…
Bam! There it was: an idea. A load of penguins huddle together one night, but get frozen together by accident. I sketched out a picture of a baby penguin poking its head out the top of the frozen huddle, wearing a hat and scarf, and I knew I had to write it.
Kids love penguins. I have no idea quite why they love them so much, but I do have a couple of theories:
1. That high-contrast black and white means that babies can pick them out, which is why they often go wide-eyed and hoot with excitement when they see pictures of them;
2. Kids often relate to animals more than they do to humans, and penguins are the most human-looking of birds – it’s a win-win
3. Penguins are so stately and dignified, but also so expressive: find me a video of a penguin falling over or running away and tell me your heart doesn’t melt. It’s like Dad’s Army On Ice (this is officially now my idea, don’t steal it)
This is one of the first times I’ve sat down to write a book that’s just silly. With my other picture books, I’ve tried lots of different things – an emotional journey about grief with THE BUILDING BOY, a heart-warming quest with SPACE TORTOISE, a full-on rhyming song about scoffing staff in TEN DELICIOUS TEACHERS. But with PENGUIN HUDDLE, I knew I wanted it to be a silly book full of giggles. Sarah Warburton’s illustrations are so naughty and mischievous, but also so warm and sweet and funny at the same time: I had high hopes for the final double spread, with a whole city of hugging animals, but she completely knocked it out of the park. It’s the perfect way to send a child to sleep at the end of the day: a silly, harmless tale full of laughs, with a cuddle at the end.
Penguin Huddle is published by Walker Books and is available now!
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.