Children’s laureate Lauren Child on her new role, motherhood and creativity

Two days before her coronation as the 10th children’s laureate, Lauren Child sits beneath an exhibition of drawings by one of her predecessors in the role, Quentin Blake, at London’s House of Illustration, looking like a biker princess. She’s wearing a canvas jacket over a glamorously ruched dress, with a skirt cut away in two deep curves at the back so that it looks as if she might be about to open up into a flower or spread her wings and fly away.

But there is no room for flightiness in her new role. Her investiture in Hull, the UK City of Culture, this week marked the start of a demanding two-year stint as champion of children and reading. She is the fourth illustrator to take the role, following on from Blake, Anthony Browne and the outgoing laureate, Chris Riddell. “I’m really keen to discuss creativity, because I feel it’s vital for all of us to be able to create and explore our world in a different way,” she says, “but there’s so much micromanagement of children today.”

As a bestselling author-illustrator for children, she is particularly puzzled by the prejudices that confront young people interested in following a similar course to her own. She traces her creativity back to a childhood spent observing and learning from her art teacher father. “My father was, and still is, very keen to elevate the subject of art, because often it produces a slightly sniffy reaction, as if it’s not academic and it’s undemanding.” The creative industries contribute more than £80bn a year to the UK economy, she points out, and many people working in them – artists, film-makers or product designers – did art at A-level.

“Illustration is seen as something less than fine art, and writing for children as slightly less than writing for adults,” she says. “That’s a shame, because we know that literature is life‑changing for children. I’d love to promote reading for pleasure, which I know other laureates have talked about before. But there’s such a lot of talk today about how children should be reading when, in fact, if you can get a child excited about it, that’s half the work done, because they’ll then have the courage or enthusiasm to carry on for themselves.”

Pleasure, in Child’s own work, is so palpably childlike that one half expects her to have invented her own name (she did change her first name from Helen to Lauren, but her surname is the one she was born with). Take her interest in doll’s houses, which has segued from an ongoing project to design and furnish a mini-mansion (currently awaiting the finishing touch of a veranda, and in the safekeeping of a friend’s mother in Wiltshire) to some of her best-loved illustrations. Her version of The Princess and the Pea sees a paper princess clambering a ladder to reach a bed piled high with textile scraps in a panelled room with a glowing candelabra. It captures a small child’s delight in miniature worlds. “Every interior is a tiny triumph, a stage across which her papery characters move,” wrote one reviewer.

Born in a small village in Wiltshire in 1965, the second of three sisters, she was the child who – like Lola from her bestselling Charlie and Lola series – was convinced she was Too Absolutely Small for School and could Not Ever Never Eat anything she didn’t like. After the family moved to the bigger town of Marlborough, she had to be coaxed into the local primary school, where her mother taught. She recalls mealtime standoffs with her parents, from which all three were rescued by the good sense of a sister, who would scrape her food into the bin when her parents weren’t looking, thereby releasing the whole family from miserable deadlock.

The first book in the Charlie and Lola series, I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, is dedicated to Soren, “who is crazy about tomatoes but would never eat a baked bean with love from Lauren who is keen on Marmite but would rather not eat a raisin”. Soren was a former boyfriend who is reincarnated in the books as Lola’s imaginary friend. The acknowledgments in her books are crisscrossed with such footprints from her real life, which then make invisible tracks into the books themselves.

After taking O-levels at the local comprehensive school, she went on to sixth form at Marlborough College, where her father was head of art. She learned that she had won a place to do fine art at Oxford’s Ruskin College only after she had accepted a place to study illustration at Manchester University.

“I always knew I wanted to do something that involved drawing. I never thought about being a writer,” she says. “I left school very excited and then came down to earth with a bump. What happened when I was 18 or 19 was that I found it hard to focus on any one area of visual arts – did I want to be a textile designer, a ceramicist or a designer of something else? I chose illustration quite randomly. It was a panic choice and I left after a year.”

In retrospect, she credits that hard time of “learning that things are not going to be as easy as I thought” with turning her from someone who shied away from opportunities into a person who grabbed them with both hands. She enrolled on a course in mixed media at City and Guilds of London Art School and then went into business with an out-of-work actor friend, making and selling lampshades.

She had already come up with her first character, Clarice Bean, but didn’t know what form she would take, when “quite by chance” she went to see Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands. “It had a profound effect on me. I realised that, by bringing in all these people – lighting, costume, scene designers – he’d created a collage, in a way.”

“It was an epiphany moment,” she says. She didn’t know whether she was writing a film or an animation, but she did know that the words and pictures fed off each other: “That’s why I’m convinced that ideas shouldn’t be compartmentalised and one should allow oneself to be inspired by film or TV. I always say to children that I spend an awful lot of time staring out of the window – I mean it literally and metaphorically because that staring into space can be very rewarding, you begin to see things. Sometimes you’re consciously looking and sometimes not.”

Clarice is the mouthy third child of four, with a dot of a mouth, a squiggle of a nose and huge eyes that are usually cast sideways in disbelief or disapproval, which she voices in comic malapropisms ringing with childish wisdom. “If somthing is not right or real dont loss yourself,” (sic) she declaims in one book. “It’s not my fault if I don’t know how many Zs there are in LOSER,” she protests in another.

Unsure of what to do with her creation, Child introduced Clarice to a schoolfriend’s mother, Helen Nicoll, author of the Meg and Mog books, who said: “I think you’ve written a book.” Child typed up the first version on a friend’s computer because she didn’t have one of her own, and submitted it as “six finished-ish paintings with bits of type stuck on”.

After years of rejections, she had two books published within weeks of each other, I Want a Pet and Clarice Bean, That’s Me, which won the Nestlé Smarties book prize in 1999. A year later she won the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration with her first Charlie and Lola book for younger children.

Although her books would go on to sell many millions of copies in more than 30 countries, it was a long time before she could earn her living through writing alone. Her “saying yes to everything phase” took her to Damien Hirst’s studio, where she was employed to mix colours for his spot paintings. “We would mix up a thousand colours at a time from teeny, tiny tins of gloss paint. Every circle was a different colour and each had three coats so you had to make this grid. I loved it because it allowed me to think while doing something quite mechanical and very beautiful.”

She continued to work one day a week for Hirst after landing a job as a receptionist for the design and marketing agency Big Fish, where she sat at a desk for five years, creating her own miniature worlds between telephone calls. On one occasion, the phone rang when she was in the middle of cutting out a picture of Clarice. “I put her down on the pine desk and thought she looked wonderful, so in my lunch hour I went out and got some of that sticky-backed wood-effect paper for lining shelves. It’s labour intensive and not quick, but it’s an inspiring way to work.”

After six Clarice Beans and four Charlie and Lola picture books – as well as illustrating new editions of classics including Pippi Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables – she was persuaded to have a go at writing chapter books for older children. Ruby Redfort was ready and waiting for her – a child genius code-cracker who was Clarice’s favourite character in a series of imaginary novels. “If you like death-defying situations and gadgets and a girl who is more tough than an archish villain then you will probably love Ruby Redfort,” proclaims the Clarice Bean fansite. “If you don’t then you are probably an armpit. Which is what Clarice calls people who are dreadfully dreary.”

The first Ruby Redfort book encountered a few “armpit” reviewers. “She’s a cartoon who lives in a cartoon world, and I fear the brilliant premise, charming detail and occasional wonderful moments can’t sustain her through the long haul of a novel,” wrote one. But Ruby defied the doubters, starring in seven novels to date, with codes specially created for her by the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.

Child, meanwhile, has diversified into television, working as writer and associate producer on three 26-episode series of Charlie and Lola, which won four Bafta awards for pre-school TV in 2007 and 2008. She has also produced a series of nature-inspired textile designs for Liberty, which she often wears herself in outfits tailored for her by a costume-designer friend – though today’s dress is by Vivienne Westwood.

Five years ago, in her mid-40s, she adopted a two-year-old girl, Tuesday, after travelling to Mongolia as a Unesco “artist for peace” and falling in love with the country and its people. “I always wanted to adopt but thought I’d have a biological child as well. It just didn’t happen like that,” she says. They live with her partner, Adrian Darbishire, a criminal barrister, in a north London house that is currently being completely refurbished, with Child as site manager. Once it’s finished she hopes to move her working life out to a studio. “I’m very easily distracted and am always wiping down surfaces. If I’m having a tough time, my house begins to look pretty tidy.”

Has being a mother changed her, other than giving her more to wipe up? “I’ve always been very interested in the way that children see things, and I love Tuesday’s turns of phrase,” she says. “But people are always asking me if I test my books out on children, and the point is that every child is different.” It is this wisdom – and the rich variety of creativity that results from it – that she hopes, above all, to impart during her time as children’s laureate. “We need to look on children’s books as a gateway to learning, and to happiness as well.”