In some ways, we'd done our own runner, evacuating from Saudi as the Iraq War began, and we didn't know how long anything would last. I was eleven and had just come out of Saudi Arabia to England I had few friends in England and thought we'd shortly go back to Saudi (we didn't).

Perhaps my love for this book is dumb, mainly because it was such a comfort to me when I first read it. In 2008 she became Dame Jacqueline Wilson.

In 2002 Jacqueline was awarded the OBE for services to literacy in schools and from 2005 to 2007 she was the Children’s Laureate. She has sold millions of books and in the UK alone the total now stands at over 35 million! Jacqueline is one of the nation’s favourite authors, and her books are loved and cherished by young readers not only in the UK but all over the world. The Story of Tracy Beaker won the 2002 Blue Peter People’s Choice Award. The Illustrated Mum won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the 1999 Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and was also shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Children’s Book Award.ĭouble Act won the prestigious Smarties Medal and the Children’s Book Award as well as being highly commended for the Carnegie Medal. Since then Jacqueline has been on countless awards shortlists and has gone on to win many awards. This was also the first of her books to be illustrated by Nick Sharratt. One of Jacqueline’s most successful and enduring creations has been the famous Tracy Beaker, who first appeared in 1991 in The Story of Tracy Beaker. As a teenager she started work for a magazine publishing company and then went on to work as a journalist on Jackie magazine (which she was told was named after her!) before turning to writing novels full-time. She always wanted to be a writer and wrote her first ‘novel’ when she was nine, filling in countless Woolworths’ exercise books as she grew up. Jacqueline Wilson was born in Bath in 1945, but spent most of her childhood in Kingston-on-Thames.

Lola rose wilson