Q&A with Nadia Shireen

The fifth book in the hilarious Grimwood series, Rock the Vote will be out on 31st July, just in time for the summer holidays. We managed to catch up with author-illustrator, Nadia Shireen, to discuss the process of writing the books and the inspiration behind them.

The Grimwood books are hugely fun to read. Is writing them as much fun as reading them?

I have to get into a slightly manic frame of mind to write them. The first draft is as if someone has put me in a barrel with a load of squirrels and rolled me down a hill. I bash out a chapter day, almost holding my breath to get into that giddy frame of mind. When the manuscript comes back from the publisher after a bit of editing for the layouts, sometimes I think, ‘Who wrote that?!’ So it’s a weird mindset. I’m tapping into my emotional memory, remembering how things feel.

Grimwood feels like a character driven book. The same characters come back again and again. Did you start by drawing the characters?

I probably did start the idea by drawing the foxes. I just found the idea of urban foxes being relocated to the countryside really funny. That was the kernel. I drew the characters and came up with silly names. I wanted to do it almost like a sitcom but set in the forest. So it did maybe start that way but it lingered in my sketchbook for ages and it was only when lockdown hit that I thought it was a good opportunity to focus on the idea and I wrote the first four chapters quite quickly.

Are any of the characters special favourites of yours?

I’m genuinely really fond of all them. Here’s a terrifying thing about authors, I think all our characters have a little bit of ourselves in them. I absolutely recognise facets of my personality in all of these animals. Ted and Nancy are both sides of my personality. At heart I think I’m an optimist and that’s Ted but Nancy is the armour you build up from adolescence. As a middle-aged woman I have a very soft spot for Pamela – she’s so liberated; she literally kills other animals in Grimwood and she’s still accepted.

The Grimwood books are very original but were there any other books that inspired them?

I loved The Animals of Farthing Wood when I was growing up. I came to Wind in the Willows embarrassingly late but it’s beautiful – there’s not a bad sentence in that book, it’s just perfection. And I read the House at Pooh Corner – I was quite dreamy and animal-focused as a child. These did influence Grimwood, but I deliberately adjusted the traditional bucolic countryside setting.

I grew up in a semi-rural place in Shropshire in an old market town where you had fields and all the rest of it but you also had the new town of Telford that had grown up around it, with out of town shopping centres, endless roundabouts, retail parks and mysterious grass verges that led nowhere. I would be reading these books and gazing out of the car window thinking, ‘We’re in the countryside now,’ and then there would be a Homebase and I’d think, ‘No we’re not.’ It was very confusing.

I wanted to bring some of that in-between-ness to Grimwood. There’s a lazy shorthand – that there are city kids and country kids – but there are so many of these in-between places and so many children live in them.

Your books are sometimes described as anarchic and yet the bad guys usually meet a traditionally bad end. How anarchic did you want them to be?

I suppose there’s anarchic and there’s being destructive for the sake of it which then can feel hollow. I wanted it to be anarchic in a silly way but I didn’t want it to feel meaningless. I suppose there is an internal logic within Grimwood. You can be very idiosyncratic and your friends can be strange – and sometimes violent – but you can still come together.

A lot of this is about relationships and family although not necessarily the family you are born into. It’s about finding your tribe because that’s very much what Ted and Nancy do. The traditional structure is not there for them, so they go into a place where everyone is a misfit and weird and flawed but loving structures still prevail. That makes it like a sitcom. It’s dysfunctional but somehow functional.

I give children jokes but I’m asking them to emotionally invest, maybe without even knowing. Some books can be funny and zany but lack heart. I want my readers to build relationships with these characters as well as finding the story silly and funny.

If you love Grimwood as much as we do, as well as reading the books, why don’t you visit Nadia Shireen’s Monster Funfair installation at the Discover Story Centre in Stratford this summer? https://discover.org.uk/event/monster-funfair/