Vivian French was best known at school for being extremely weedy, and for talking a lot. She continued her attachment to words by becoming first an actor, then a story-teller and finally a writer of children's books... she's not sure how many she's written (she's not good at maths), but it's somewhere around two hundred. Many of them are for children at the age of seven and less, but she does write for older children too - and also non-fiction, which she says is very exciting because you find out so many things you never knew about.