Spring Edition 2019

Dreaming of
DRAGONS
Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon series has sold over 7
million copies worldwide and inspired a generation of young readers.
Alumna of Marlborough, she talks to Amanda Morison about the
importance of letting children be creative in the classroom and going
wild in the great outdoors
Cressida Cowell
read English at
Oxford (Keble
College) and
went on to Saint
Martin’s School of Art and
Brighton University to study art.
Asked which is more important
to her work, the words or the
illustration she admits, “I can’t
imagine one without the other.
I draw maps to make the setting
feel like a real place, and write and
sketch the characters to get a sense
of what they’re like”. This brings
to mind other author / illustrators,
not least J.R. Tolkien who Cowell
believes was inspired by his time
on archaeological digs. “It was
riddled with holes which may
well have given him ideas for the
Hobbit. It’s very interesting how
the British landscape inspires”.
Cowell’s passion for igniting the imagination is
inextricably linked with this belief in the importance
of nature. Her well-documented childhood was
spent in London (where aged five she’d cross
London by bus with her sister to go to school –
“Imagine doing that now!”) and a deserted Scottish
Above: Setting off on an island adventure in
the 1970s. Cressida pictured as a child on her
family’s Hebridean island. Right: Inspiring young
imaginations of Vale Primary School pupils in
Little Hurst Wood, Surrey through her passion for
nature, The Wizards of Once heroes Xar and Wish.
island. In true Swallows &
Amazons-style, Cowell and her
siblings roamed and sailed free
all day. She feels that humans
are hard-wired to explore, and
without it there would be no
creativity. “I worry about children’s
access to nature. Nature writer
Robert Macfarlane describes how
the Oxford English Dictionary
has stopped printing words like
bluebell and acorn and replaced
them with broadband and blog. If
you lose these words it’s symbolic
with losing touch with the
countryside”.
While children might dream
of visiting Burke, How to Train
Your Dragon’s fictional island,
Cowell admits that social services
would arrest you if you tried
to recreate the circumstances
of her own childhood, “Sailing
alone without life jackets probably isn’t a good idea.
But you can take children to uninhabited places,
camping or just somewhere with no internet. Let
them climb trees!”.
This passion for nature has led Cowell to work
with the Woodland Trust as an Honorary Nature