Conn Iggulden and Lizzy Duncan: the vital spark The author and the illustrator explain how bonfire night banter ignited new careers for both of them
Story by Richard Lea, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009


Flying tonight ... Tollins, freshly escaped from fireworks. Illustration: Lizzy Duncan

It all happened because of bonfire night. As he stood with family and friends amid the oohs and aahs of the village firework display, novelist Conn Iggulden found himself trying to explain, in answer to a curious child's question, how the fireworks made such pretty colours.
"So I said that they stuff a fairy inside, and that the 'whee' you can hear is the fairy screaming," he says. Before long he was telling a story about tough little fairies getting blown up which amused and horrified a small circle of his children and their friends. The illustrator Lizzy Duncan, who happened to be standing nearby, remembers "chuckling in the background, looking at all these kids' faces going 'Oh my God!'" She told Iggulden she had an image of the story in her head; he asked her if she'd draw it for him.
"I really don't think I knew who he was," she says. "I hadn't put two and two together and come up with Conn Iggulden. It didn't occur to me that the drawing would lead to anything." But the collaboration sparked that evening ignited a new career in children's fiction for the historical novelist Iggulden: he teamed up with Duncan to produce Tollins, a handsomely illustrated tale about the eponymous small flying people who live unnoticed at the bottom of the garden, in which he tells the story of how, when bumbling humans start catching them to add to their fireworks, one of them fights back.
"I went home and was so inspired," he says, "that I wrote the first story in a stream". About 5,000 words came "ever so fast, and then I polished it, and gave it to Lizzy to see what she thought. She came back with some drawings and I said 'I think we're on to something'."

Before his fortuitous encounter with Duncan, Iggulden had often wondered what it would be like to work with an illustrator, and had even tried his hand at producing his own picture book called The Magic Marigolds. "I thought, 'it can't be that hard'," he says. "My agent still talks about it as the worst idea I've ever had." But he and Duncan hit it off straight away. After spending the 1990s working in animation, Tollins was Duncan's first shot at illustrating a children's book, something she'd wanted to do "since I was very small". "Thank goodness everyone had a bit of faith," she says, "because I was coming into this with a very blank canvas." "I've always been slightly wary of those people who are precious about their art," says Iggulden. "I've always tried to be professional, and Lizzy had much the same attitude."
Read the full piece at The Guardian online.

Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children by Conn Iggulden 240pp, HarperCollins Children's Books, £14.99