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I was born in Ealing, London on October 18th 1942 - so now I am 62!! Until I was eleven my name wasn't Colin Thompson it was Colin Willment. Willment was my father's name and my mother changed it to Thompson when she married my stepfather. Looking back I wish she hadn't. She cut my father off completely and I only met him once when I was nineteen. Now he's dead so it's too late, though I recently made contact with his family through searching on the internet and found a first cousin, Robert Willment, who lives in America. So now I have a whole new family. He and his wife came over to Australia when Anne and I got married in 1999.

I went to boarding school in Yorkshire, grammar school in West London and spent two years at art school in Ealing and Hammersmith where, to my dismay, I met people who could draw much better than I could. I met my first wife at art school and not long after, met my first daughter, Charlotte.

I have worked as a silk-screen printer, a graphic designer, a stage manager in the theatre but never as a lumberjack in Canada or a sailor on a tramp-steamer in the South Seas. I studied film making for a year, got married for the second time and worked for a while making documentaries at the BBC.

In 1968 I went to live in Majorca but less than a year later moved with, my second wife, to a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland where we spent seven years trying to stand upright in the wind and began twenty years working in ceramics. I also tried living off the land but all I got was an acre of weeds, backache, a pet chicken and two more daughters, Hannah and Alice, though not necessarily in that order.

In 1975 I moved to Cumbria where I lived and worked in an old farmhouse on the edge of a forest for twenty years. During this time I planted hundreds of trees and made a lake that is now home to a family of mediaeval carp. At one time my house was home for five rescued dogs and three cats.

I now have four grandchildren Ella 22, Duncan 20 and Ruth 16 who are Charlotte's children and now Walter who was born in January 2006 and is Alice's son.

In 1990 I started writing and illustrating children's books and by the end of 2002 will have had thirty books published. Since then I have never looked back or even sideways.

In March 1995 I visited a school in Sydney, Australia and fell so much in love with the place that two weeks later I came back to live here. And on April 9th 1999 I married Anne, the teacher librarian who organised my visit to the school.

In February 1999 we moved to Bellingen, inland from Coff's Harbour and about eight hours north of Sydney. It is probably the most beautiful place on earth.

I have always believed in the magic of childhood and think that if you get your life right that magic should never end. I feel that if a children's book cannot be enjoyed properly by adults there is something wrong with either the book or the adult reading it. This of course, is just a smart way of saying I don't want to grow up.

My favourite fruit is cherries and my favourite music is Rock and Roll and old Blues records and I am now an Australian citizen. I am left-handed and colour-blind.

I was born in Ealing, London on October 18th 1942 - so now I am 62!! Until I was eleven my name wasn't Colin Thompson it was Colin Willment. Willment was my father's name and my mother changed it to Thompson when she married my stepfather. Looking back I wish she hadn't. She cut my father off completely and I only met him once when I was nineteen. Now he's dead so it's too late, though I recently ... More