India, May 24 -- 1 What was your way into the book? It struck me that children's literature was a slightly neglected field. It also struck me that children's literature is dismissed as less important than the grown-up stuff. I felt strongly that the opposite was the case. These stories are foundational. Every reading career begins with children's reading. That's also because, as I argue, children's stories are closely connected to myths and folk tales, the most primal forms of storytelling. The quest narratives, the heroes and villains, the magical transformations, the talking animals and all the things we see in children's literature right up to this day tell us something quite fundamental about the roots of storytelling. 2Your book's scope is vast. It goes beyond encapsulating children's bookshelves and tries to understand why these books strike a chord. If you write about the history of children's literature, you realise there is a social history to be told here. You're writing about the story of childhood itself because adults write children's stories and tell you something about what adults thought children needed or wanted or imagined what childhoods were. Also, every adult who writes about children starts from their childhood memory, which tells you how adults felt about their own childhoods. I thought it seemed such a rich subject and, of course, what a pleasure to research. My jumping-off point was that there aren't that many, or there didn't seem to be a kind of narrative history for the general public on this subject... because my book doesn't pretend to be academic. It is a work of love and enthusiasm aimed at the interested general reader rather than the specialist. I wanted to produce something that would hopefully delight readers and send them back to the books of their own childhood or books they missed the first time around. 3 'Children's literature' is a slippery term. Is it books by children, for children? What is it, according to you? I slightly dodged the question by calling it A History of Childhood Reading. I wanted to open up at least the possibility of many children's literatures. Children read pretty voraciously. They don't stay within boundaries and set texts. Two impressive young school children came up to me in a signing queue just after my event (at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025) saying, what do you think of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility for childhood? Fantastic that they're so advanced at that age. But it is the other way too. You'll be 15 or 16 and still reading young- adult material. It's very elastic. A lot of children's writers I respect the most, including Alan Garner and Philip Pullman, will explicitly disavow the idea that they are children's writers. That's a fruitful way of thinking about it because the best stuff will have an enormous amount of nourishing, moving and interesting material for both the adult reader and the child. When I was writing this book, my editor told me that a very significant portion of YA readers are women in their thirties, and why not? Read what you enjoy....