As The Scarecrows' Wedding is being released on the 25th December this year, I thought we could have a look at how the Gruffalo and friends came to be.
Who are the Gruffalo and Friends
The Gruffalo and Friends are Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler’s, collection of books. These include books such as Zog, Room on the Broom, The Scarecrows' Wedding and famously The Gruffalo.
The Beginning
Julia grew up in a very musical family and took part in many plays at school, which was the origin of her love for poetry and storytelling. Julia went to university in Bristol, where she met her husband. During the university breaks, she travelled around the world busking with her friends, and this was where she began to write songs, poetry and plays.
After university, Julia was employed as a junior editor at Michael Joseph publishers and she continued to climb the ladder until her move to Bristol, where she was appointed editor at Robert Tynall, a small book publisher. This is also around the time when she was creating songs for BBC Children's Television. Some of her songs were recorded for BBC albums!
Donaldson composed two children's musicals, King Grunt’s Cake (1976) and Pirate on the Pier (1980), these plays were performed in London and Brighton. After the success of the plays, this influenced Donaldson to create a Saturday-morning workshop for children for two years, which led her to gain a postgraduate qualification in education, where she became an English teacher in Brighton.
After the birth of her first child, Julia never went back to full-time work and instead filled her time volunteering at schools and writing a few songs for adult TV shows.
In 1991, Julia was contacted asking to make one of her songs, A Squash and a Squeeze written in 1975, into a children's picture book. The picture book was published in 1993 and was illustrated by Axel Scheffler. The publishing of this book proved to Donaldson that her love for poetry and songwriting could be used for storytelling, which drove Donaldson to begin sending samples to publishers.
The Gruffalo was created when Julia was looking for ideas through plays based on traditional tales, this is when she came across a chinese tale of a girl who escapes being eaten by a tiger by claiming to be the queen of the jungle, the tiger then follows her as she walks through the forest, other animals run away from her as the tiger is following behind. Donaldson changed the girl into a mouse and the tiger into the well-known Gruffalo. The Gruffalo text was then sent to Axel Scheffler and the story was published in 1999.
The Gruffalo’s success was immense, winning several awards, being translated into over 50 languages and selling over 50 million copies worldwide. Since the release of The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson has created books such as Room on the Broom, Stick Man, The Gruffalo's Child, Zog, The Scarecrows' Wedding and many more.
Currently, Donaldson has written 210 books and continues to perform in theatre productions. Donaldson is now promoting her latest book, Paper Chase, and is working on a new Gruffalo Book, which will be released in 2026.
Other Media
Movies
Julia Donaldson has had 12 of her books made into kids' films. The first being The Gruffalo, created in 2009, and the most recent, created in 2025, The Scarecrows' Wedding, which releases on Christmas Day.
Plays
Julia has adapted some of her famous books into plays to get kids more involved in the books and theatre. Julia has also created a play about WW2 Evacuees and Roman Britain.
These plays have been created and performed all over the world, including the West End, Broadway and Sydney Opera House.
Songbooks
As Julia grew up on writing songs and musicals, she has created songbooks for most of her character books and created the songs with her husband, Malcolm
Merchandise
There are so many different types of merchandise from the popular books, such as plushies, pillows, clothing, bags, decorations, socks or even bucket hats, etc
Gruffalo Land
Twycross Zoo, Leicestershire, is a conservation charity and has a Gruffalo section to the zoo where visitors can discover all your favourite characters in the deep dark wood while also seeing the wildlife, such as owls or butterflies.
Cameos
Royal Mint
2024 was the 20 year anniversary of The Gruffalo’s Child, to celebrate this Royal Mint created unique coins with the mouse and the child of the Gruffalo. This was also done in 2019 for the 20th anniversary of The Gruffalo
Social Distancing Posters
In 2020, when we were all social distancing, Donaldson and Scheffler created posters explaining to children the regulations at the time.
Yorkshire Tree
In 2015, Yorkshire Tea pledged to plant 1 million trees between 2015 and 2020. Yorkshire Tea teamed up with The Gruffalo, The Woodland Trust and thousands of schools to help with the scheme.
The Gruffalo helped to promote the pledge with a change in Yorkshire Teas’ packaging, being changed to Yorkshire Tree and an illustration of the Gruffalo and the mouse.
The campaign succeeded with over 2 million trees planted by late 2019.
