A Q&A Interview with Nick Sharratt on his book, Vikings in the Supermarket

Vikings in the Supermarket is Nick Sharratt’s first collection of nonsense poetry. He answers our questions.

You’ve said you always knew you would be an artist – did you always know you would be a poet too?

After Art, English was my next favourite subject at school and I wasn’t too bad at it. I remember being very proud when a poem I wrote about Robin Hood’s hiding tree (we lived near Sherwood Forest at the time) was printed in my primary school’s annual magazine and I won a couple of prizes for English essays at secondary school. But I found writing much more arduous than drawing and inevitably got into a real tangle halfway through every creative piece I attempted – I still do! A career as some kind of artist seemed the obvious choice to me, becoming an author or poet was just going to be too exhausting!

When thinking up the poems for Vikings in the Supermarket, which came first: pictures or words?

The pictures came first. I thought of characters that I felt I would enjoy illustrating, set myself the challenge of finding poems to go with them and very slowly something resulted. (I can’t seem to discipline myself to writing deadlines the way I can with illustration work.)

You famously illustrate other people’s texts as well as writing your own. What do you like best about these different ways of working?

It’s wonderfully stimulating to have the mix of doing it all myself and working with other authors. There’s a huge satisfaction in being the sole creator of a picture book but as I can never be sure how and when ideas are going to come I couldn’t sustain that all the time. Illustrating other people’s texts stretches me in that I so often have to draw characters and situations I wouldn’t have thought of attempting otherwise, and it’s mightily rewarding when I find a way to do it. And oddly enough I frequently find new ideas for my own projects drifting into my mind when I’m busy producing illustrations for another writer.

You’ve now illustrated close to 250 books in your career. Has your approach to illustration changed over the years?

I really don’t think my approach has changed greatly in that there is still a sense of adventure and even trepidation at the start of each new project and I still have to feel my way gradually into the illustrations. The number of roughs I need to do in general hasn’t got any less. Although I now colour my work digitally as opposed to using crayons or liquid acrylic inks, I don’t think it’s particularly speeded up the working process. Manual colouring meant I only had one go at it whereas Photoshop gives me endless possibilities to tweak and to be super-pernickety. I continue to do the line drawing manually, usually in soft pencil.

Which of the poems in Vikings in the Supermarket is your favourite and why?

I think it has to be the title poem ‘Vikings in the Supermarket’. It took me an age to get it right but I was determined to do something funny with Vikings and their helmets, inspired by the excitement I saw in young children at a Vikings exhibition in Edinburgh and fuelled also by the enthusiastic ticking-off I was given by a class of primary children years ago who wrote to tell me it was factually inaccurate to give the Viking horns in the picture book You Choose!

Is there something you are longing to illustrate that you haven’t yet had a chance to do?

I’d like to get increasingly ambitious with my own writing projects and illustrate those. Watch this space

Vikings in the Supermarket is published by David Fickling Books.