Horrid Henry is turning 25. "It's the 25th book, 25 years, 100th story," says Francesca Simon of the latest title, Up, Up and Away, featuring her most famous character, "which is rather nice."
"It was kind of by accident, really," she says of the series' beginnings. "I was asked by Judith Elliott, who'd just started a children's list at Orion, for some Early Readers. I'd been thinking about parental favouritism, so I wrote a story called ‘Horrid Henry'." Though it was ultimately rejected as "too difficult", Elliott liked the story-Simon praises her "visionary" influence on Horrid Henry's structure, saying, "That's why every book has four stories, because she said if we do four stories, then we can make it for newly confident readers. I got the alliteration and the four-story format, really, because of my editor trying to make a story work."
