Interview - Cressida Cowell: Island inspiration for dragon creator

All gothic rings and black clothes. So Cressida Cowell is a bit of a surprise. Pretty, blonde and ridiculously enthusiastic – is this quite posh, young looking mum of three really the author of a book where a young viking trains a dragon?

The roots of Cowell's book, and the extraordinary imagination which created the story it tells, lies in an unusual childhood. For most of the time she lived in central London, where she went to school and grew up. Then, during the school holidays, the family would relocate to a remote Scottish Island.

"Where I grew up in London, in central London, it was very urban, no garden," she says. "But then, from being very tiny, I spent my holidays on the west coast of Scotland on an island which was entirely uninhabited.

"We would be dropped off on the island, then two weeks later we would be picked up. There were no houses, no shops, no electricity. That programme Castaway, where people were stranded on a desert island? That's what our lives were like – there were no mobile phones or anyway of contacting the outside world."

As she got older, Cowell's family spent longer periods on the island.

"You can't take enough food with you to last such a long time, so you have to go out and catch fish and gather scollops," she says.

Despite the lack of all the mod cons people demand today, there was plenty to do on the island, Cowell found.

She and her brother read voraciously, made up stories.

"We were always writing and drawing, making up stories. That was what we did," she says.

Looking back, it was clearly the perfect training for Cowell's future career. She attended Oxford, where she read English and on graduating went into publishing.

Hodder Children's books, the company which publishes Cowell's How To Train Your Dragon series, has a representative at the interview, so Cowell is a little embarrassed to say that working for a publishing company was not for her.

She says: "I realised very quickly that the business world of publishing just wasn't for me. I wanted to do something more creative."

She quit publishing and went to study graphic and illustration at the famous St Martin's College.

Cowell says it took a while before she landed on the idea of becoming a children's author and it was thanks to winning a competition run by Macmillan that she began to really consider the idea.

"It took me a while and it was through being at art school that I really started to think about it," she says,

"I would love to be able to say that right from the beginning I wanted to be a writer, I liked the idea of telling stories, but I thought I would become an illustrator or something like that.

"After I won the competition with Macmillan and met an editor I had my first book published with Hodder while I was still at art school."

In 2002 her first book, What Shall We Do With the Boo-Hoo Baby was published, then a year later came the first of the How To Train Your Dragon books, which became the series which made Cowell famous. She is currently working on book nine of the series.

In a way it's a surprise that it took so long for Cowell to write the story, given that it was as a child on the Scottish island was the first time she had the idea for her story.

"Writing is always a fantasy, you're always making something up, but the fact that it was based on something I had experience – if writing is a big lie, it makes the lie more convincing if it's based on some truth you have felt and experienced," she says.

The books follow the adventures of the young viking Hiccup, living on the island of Berk who learns how to train his dragon on the island of Berk, inspired by Cowell's time on the Scottish island.

Interestingly, the movie of the book, made by Dreamworks – the company behind Shrek, is quite different to the book, but this is not something that concerns the author too much.

"It is very different. Although the central themes are the same, things like the dragons are much bigger – in the books they are the size of a dog, but if you are making a movie where dragons fly, you need to have the dragons be much bigger than that," she says. "I have visited the studio a number of times and we went to the LA premiere last week and then flew back to England for the London premiere, which was all incredibly exciting."

As exciting as it was, was it not also difficult to let go of the books and hand them on to a new group of creative people to fashion their own stories? "You're not really letting it go, because you've got your books. There they are – I've got eight of them, you're not letting it go, I never saw it like that, authors do vary very much on how they feel. I don't know what the right way to think about it is. If it felt too much to me like it was letting it go, I wouldn't have allowed it to be optioned in the first place.

"Maybe as an author you have to decide how you feel about it. The books were mine, there they were and that wasn't going away. So I was happy to see the studio make a film as they saw best."