The Baddies: the wickedly funny picture book from the creators of Zog and Stick Man, now available in paperback!

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Why? It’s because she gets to marry her husband Malcolm all over again. She plays Betty O’Barley (“I give her an Irish accent”) and he plays Harry O’Hay, the scarecrow whose love is threatened by the arrival of the dastardly Reginald Drake. “I like it because it’s got that Hollywood love triangle.” You’ll have to ask the pig, I’m not responsible for my characters!” laughs Scheffler, and Donaldson nods: “It’s nice when children see things in the books I’m not aware of. You know they’re really looking at them.” A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood / The mouse saw the nut and the nut looked good,” Donaldson begins. The temperature outside is a furnace, but watching Donaldson perform her own classic, it’s impossible not to shiver with joy.

He tends to read things out loud in what we call his Dylan Thomas voice, this sort of cod Welsh accent, and it always sounds quite good when he does it.” It’s not difficult to see elements of Donaldson’s own story in her work. Born into a bohemian family in Hampstead, north London, she grew up in a home that she, her parents and sister shared with her grandmother, uncle and aunt. Her parents encouraged her and her sister “to absolutely be ourselves”, and Donaldson wrote musical versions of fairytales, which the four of them would perform for the extended family. To this day, she thinks of herself as a “performer-author”, and she and Malcolm frequently put on shows of her books; at the time of our interview, they are preparing for a performance at the Edinburgh festival. Malcolm, whom she mentions frequently, is the only person with whom she shares early ideas and drafts, discussing things while walking near their home in West Sussex, and showing him “half-baked manuscripts”. Scheffler always likes to add little extras to the illustrations. "I don't mention a cat," Donaldson explains of The Baddies. "But there's a witch's cat with fangs... and a lovely bit where the cat is holding out the spell book for the witch to look at."We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! 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. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. When a little girl moves into a nearby cottage, the Baddies can’t wait to scare her out of her wits. The ghost tries to scare the little girl in her bedroom — she offers him a warm bath and a cup of tea.Does she see books as a way for children to learn about the world around them, or an oasis in which they can escape from it? No, no!” cries Donaldson, while Scheffler says simultaneously “Oh that’s a good idea!” He then ponders how he might have pulled that off, Donaldson’s objections notwithstanding: “I should have drawn one of the baddies with that [Boris Johnson] hair.”

Well, we don’t usually have people in our books at all,” says Donaldson, meaning that their collaborations are usually animal- (and Gruffalo) based. I feel that's part of my job," adds Scheffler. And, as fans of their work know, there's always a picture of a gruffalo hidden somewhere in each of their books.Scheffler found his way into art by being political. “When I was growing up in Hamburg, there was the Vietnam war going on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there are teenage drawings of mine in which I reflected on that, so that was my formation,” he says. “Oh! I didn’t know that,” says Donaldson, turning to him in surprise. “Now I draw rabbits and mice,” he says and they look at each other and laugh.