Here are some facts about Cressida Cowell.
- Cressida Cowell was born in London on 15th April 1966.
- She has three children (Maisie, Clemmie and Alexander).
- She’s married to a man called Simon Cowell (not the judge on X-Factor!)
- Cressida Cowell studied English at Oxford University and illustration at Brighton University.
- Her first published work was a picture book called Little Bo Peep’s Library Book. It came out in 1998.
- She’s had more than 20 books published – a mixture of novels and picture books.
- She doesn’t like spiders.
- Her best friend at school was Lauren Child, the author of the Charlie and Lola books.
- The first of Cressida Cowell’s books to feature the character Hiccup was How to Train Your Dragon. It was published in 2003.
- Other Hiccup titles include: How To Be a Pirate, How To Speak Dragonese, How To Cheat A Dragon’s Curse, How To Twist A Dragon’s Tale, How To Steal A Dragon’s Sword, and How To Betray a Dragon’s Hero.
- On 26th March 2010 a computer animated movie version of How To Train Your Dragon was released by DreamWorks Animation. How To Train Your Dragon 2 came out in 2014. The plot of the movie is almost completely different from the book’s story line.
- She was 32 when she first had a book published.
- Her favourite teacher was Miss MacDonald who taught history.
- As a child, Cressida used to do lots of drawing and writing when she went on holiday with her family to an island, Little Colonsay, off the west coast of Scotland.
- She won the Nestle Children’s Book Prize in 2006 for That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown.
- How To Train Your Dragon has been translated into more than 20 languages.
- She read a wide variety of books as a child. She particularly liked books by Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander.
- Her favourite book as a child was The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones.
- Some of her favourite writers today include, Louis Sachar, Michelle Paver and David Almond.
- It takes her about a year to write a Hiccup book. This includes the illustrations.
- If she could be anyone from history, she would choose William Shakespeare.
- Cressida Cowell would have liked to have been a teacher or and anthropologist if she hadn’t become a writer.
What next? Visit our Books and Authors resources page to discover more facts about famous children’s authors.
