Baby’s First Board Book Pack Award-winning team Pack by Allan Ahlberg (author), Rod Campbell (author), Julia Donaldson (author), and Michael Rosen (author) (UK edition)

Allan has been delighting children of all ages for more than thirty years. Classic characters like Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman have become firm favourites with a generation of children who are now reading them to their own offspring. Innovative, funny and moving, his work encompasses storybooks, picture books, easy readers, joke books and novels as well as poems.

Many of his books were collaborations with his wife, Janet, an illustrator, and they quickly became one of Britain’s leading author/illustrator teams.

Influenced by comics and cartoons, their perfect partnership went on to produce masterpieces including Peepo!, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Baby’s Catalogue.

Janet sadly died in 1994, but Allan has gone on to work with other illustrators and is still producing lots of new books.

Rod Campbell has been making children’s books for over 30 years. Best known for Dear Zoo, he is also the creator of the popular pre-school character Buster. Ingeniously simple, with touches of gentle humour, Rod’s books are loved all over the world by children, parents and teachers alike. Dear Zoo celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2012.

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs.”

Michael Rosen was born into a London Jewish family, the son of two distinguished educators – Connie and Harold Rosen. Michael’s childhood was rich in books, stories and conversation.

Michael attended Middlesex Hospital Medical School for a year but transferred to Wadham College, Oxford to study English Literature. At Oxford, he started to realise his ambition of acting (as well as writing and directing). Michael still says that if he wasn’t a poet, he’d like to be an actor. Anyone who has seen him in performance knows that he already is!

The narrowness of his course of study proved a source of dissatisfaction and Michael began looking outside his recommended reading to contemporary working, class ballads. He retains a passion for street rhymes, popular songs and folk stories.

Michael Rosen has been writing poetry since the age of 18. His first collection, Mind Your Own Business, was published in 1974. Although it was not planned as a collection for children, it appeared on Andre Deutsch’s children’s list. This, says Michael, was a turning point – “Suddenly it all fused: the writing, the performing, the popular audience. It was just incredibly exhilarating.”

He quickly made a name for himself with his collections of humorous verse and picture books for children. He is described as one of the most significant figures in contemporary children’s poetry, drawing closely on his own childhood experiences, and ‘telling it as it was’ in the ordinary language children actually use.

Michael is now a poet, author and broadcaster, and was Children’s Laureate from 2007-2009.