About Cressida

I grew up in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The island had no roads, houses or electricity.

The name of the island is a secret, but it was such a small island it wasn’t really big enough to have a name at all. There were no roads or shops, just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea-birds and heather.

When I was four, my family would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman and picked up again two weeks later. In those days there were no mobile phones, so we had absolutely no way of contacting the outside world during that time. If something went wrong, we just had to sit tight and hope that the boat really did come to pick us up in two weeks time.

This is Cressida, aged 9, writing on the island

By the time I was eight, my family had built a small stone house on the island, and my father got a boat, so we could fish for enough food to feed the family for the whole summer.

From then on, every year we spent four weeks of the summer and two weeks of the spring on the island. The house was lit by candle-light, and there was no telephone or television, so I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evening, my father told us tales of the Vikings who invaded this island Archipelago twelve hundred years before, of the quarrelsome Tribes who fought and tricked each other, and of the legends of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs.

This is Cressida, her husband Simon and their 3 children, setting off for the island

It seemed perfectly possible that dragons might live in this wild, stormy, place. So I was only eight or nine years old when I first began to write stories about Vikings and dragons.

When I left school, I went to university to study English, and then to art college where I got degrees in graphic design and illustration.

For my final project at art school I created a childrens’ book called ‘Little Bo Peep’s Library Book’, and I was lucky enough to have that book published by Hodder Childrens’ Books in 1998. Since then I have written ten more picture books, including the ‘Emily Brown’ stories, which won the Nestle childrens’ book prize in 2006.

In 2002 I began to write a book for older children. I remembered the stories I had written on the island as a child, and turned these ideas into the book ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’ There are now eight books in the Hiccup series and I am working on the ninth.

A film of “How to Train Your Dragon’ is being made by DreamWorks Animation and will be in the cinemas in March 2010.