‘Laughter is delayed fear’ (Roald Dahl) or… a career in children’s books

Barry Cunningham retired at the end of 2025 – after nearly 50 years in publishing, mainly in children’s books, from Kaye Webb’s Puffin via Chatto, Cape and Bodley Head to Bloomsbury and signing Harry Potter, to setting up his own publishing company, The Chicken House. He looks back at half a century of children’s publishing.

Sometimes I think all children’s books are really about what scares children most, and how to deal with it. And I suppose that means what still terrifies us adults too – and what remains from our childhood, that we need to overcome or come to terms with. That’s all the big things: love, hate, resentment, lack of confidence, who we find attractive, what makes us angry – and of course, how we feel about animals! And I think we publishers and authors have got better, braver and more respectful at our task – using, like the quote above from Roald Dahl, all those important techniques that help children learn, laugh and feel those stories fiercely. But maybe at a cost.

Back when I began in publishing, in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols, children’s books were a backwater (even in the mighty Penguin) – left to capable women who didn’t really trouble the might of the sales departments (and their once-a-year Puffin promotion), whilst squirrelling away funds and favours for school activities and Kaye’s precious baby, The Puffin Club. Here, something special dawned on my understanding. The Puffin Club invented social media before the internet was even dreamt about, inviting children to join a club about what reading was for – adventure and imagination for sure, but practical skills like knot making and animal tracking too. I was cross with Kaye because she had more Puffin Club helpers than the embryonic Marketing Department – still called The Schools Unit, had at its disposal. But I saw the transforming power of story in real children’s lives: something to take and treasure in the future for me.

But what of the authors? There were exceptions, of course, Roald Dahl, Robert Westall, the Ahlbergs, Diana Wynne Jones, but most were quite content with steady domestic stories where adults always knew best, and love was a cat on the rug. But gradually things were changing – tough, adventurous stories began to sell to young adults too – The Wizard of Earthsea, The Dark is Rising, following the breakthrough of the violent and cruel Watership Down. Editors like Tony Lacey and Liz Attenborough ushered in gaming books and real-life school stories (always the toughest place). And of course, I recognised another key difference in the changing world of children’s books – some authors became just as important as the characters in their books, to their eager readers. And the children’s editorial process demonstrated how that was built as part of a collaboration with editors, working on plot, character and direction, together. So, the result was a crafted piece of work, with due regard to what children needed and would respond to. A new successful business began to emerge, maybe more in line with the team work around films, and marketing began to work with editorial, and design and art, together, to build story. This was quite different from my experience in adult books, where the author was clearly king, and we followed with money and…more money

So, when I was gloriously given the opportunity of starting a children’s list from scratch – courtesy of high-risk strategist Nigel Newton at Bloomsbury – I wanted those books that children themselves would respond to, books for ‘book huggers,’ whose emotional appeal was high, with lots of action and very very importantly, that used humour to enhance or interpret experience. So, I had no hesitation in choosing a book – and a series, that (unbeknown to me) the rest of the publishing world had rejected. So, Harry Potter was born, and the era of rock star authors, and such huge sales that adult lists began falling over themselves to commission children’s books. I will always be so in awe of what Jo Rowling achieved: to make reading cool again, especially for boys, and literally to create a generation of readers is an achievement like no other. All this was wonderful, and allowed me to leave Bloomsbury and start Chicken House with my colleagues Elinor Bagenal and Rachel Hickman. There we lived the dream: a children’s list that could build through sales, marketing, editorial and rights, a perfect storm of innovation and risk taking, where new authors could grow – latterly with the brilliant support of Scholastic in the USA, as well as in the UK and Australia – making careers as varied as those of Kevin Brooks, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, MG Leonard, Maz Evans, Cornelia Funke and James Dashner.

But simultaneously the market was changing, as had been well observed. Middle Grade began to fail – series to languish and shorter illustrated books take over. Was this as a result of falling literacy, a post COVID phenomenon, or something more permanent? Time will tell, but alongside this came the massive rise in Young Adult books – with more sex, violence and pure romance than we ever imagined, back in the day when we tried out ‘teen’ titles at the top end of older middle grade (anyone remember Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen?) So – at Chicken House we found ourselves publishing brilliant series like Amie Jordan’s All the Hidden Monsters for 20, or even 30-year-old young women readers, as well as the young adults we expected. Here’s a dilemma: do we work to appeal to this growing market – encouraging content that goes way beyond what an emerging teen might expect or experience? Do we treat this part of our market as just another publishing category – ignoring any child-centred mission to inform, even educate? I think this is a situation that has grown directly out of our success. By treating children as fully formed consumers, as true-to-life versions of adults, with fantasy worlds as superbly realistic parallel universes where our moral, political and family relationships explode into life – we have created an alternative to adult literature. Here, good and bad can resolve, where hope still largely lives, and characters are much, much larger than this ordinary world can contain. Pretty cool, eh – let’s take the win, but worry about what we are losing. We need to find ways to reclaim the Middle Grade readers, to keep children’s books for children as well as continue to respect those older readers we have drawn into our books and series – through our superbly strong editorial work with authors, using marketing to reach out through the new channels, as well as to our best friends in schools and libraries.

We should find strength in our dedication – and the importance of childhood to our futures!

Chicken House continues to publish new authors and build exciting talent with its new Publisher, Rachel Leyshon with the team in Frome and with Scholastic Books around the world. Barry will continue his association through Chicken House Entertainment, and working with his colleagues as Chair of The Times/Chicken House new writers’ Children’s Fiction Competition.