Why Liz Pichon is a comedy draw

If you have any particularly soggy camping memories then you'll just love the Tom Gates books by Liz Pichon.

It's easy to see why Pichon, who illustrates and writes children's books, won the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2011 for The Brilliant World Of Tom Gates (Scholastic).

Tom's school essay 'Camping Sucks' is about his family's disastrous camping trip. Pichon nicely sends up Tom's father with a huge 'spot the problem' doodle indicating what his dad has missed: the proximity of the family tent to the river.

Pichon, a Londoner, said: "I had been playing around with the idea of how to do Tom Gates, and the camping trip, which brought up some family memories, just seemed a good element to weave into the tale.

"I do festival talks and events and when I was at The Hay Festival this year and asked kids to put up their hands if they had been camping, most of the children in the room raised their hands. And when I asked 'was it cold and wet?' all the hands went up again."

Pichon's books are bursting with humour and you can tell it comes from real experiences and observations. Now 48, she is the youngest of four children. Her mother and father encouraged her to write and draw from a young age and the scrapbooks she kept have proved invaluable resources.

Pichon said: "I was close to my parents and my mother, Joan, now 86, was always quite an artistic woman. She was half Burmese and actually escaped the invasion of the Japanese into Burma when she was 16 by trekking across the Himalayas on foot with some other people. I didn't really grasp until I was an adult how amazing her young life had been."

Pichon's father was an RAF Pilot and the family grew up in North London. She went to St Augustine's secondary school in Kilburn before doing an A Level art course at Kingsway College in Holborn. She had a great time there, mixing a lot with drama students who included a young Kathy Burke. "She was a brilliant drama student, always making everyone laugh on stage or in the canteen."

Pichon then studied Graphic Design at Middlesex Polytechnic before working for Jive Records in Willesden as an Art Director. They were enriching, hectic experiences, including working with the over-sized musicians from the Chicago band Mammoth.

She's still proud of the work she did at Jive, including album covers for Ruby Turner. Jive was also the place she met her future husband, Mark Flannery, a music producer who had worked with Def Leppard.

So it's natural that music plays its part in the Tom Gates books. The main character loves a band called Dude 3 and forms, with his friend Derek, his own band called Dog Zombies. It's a running joke in the new book, Tom Gates: Excellent Excuses And Other Good Stuff that the middle-aged dads keep trying to elbow their way into their children's bands.

Pichon has learned her trade the thorough way. She has designed greetings cards (where you have to be funny in double-quick time) and written lots of children's picture books - but all the elements of wit and cartoon and lettering come together in Tom Gates.

She works from a shed in her Brighton home (which she shares with husband and three children) and takes painstaking care over getting each page of the book right. The publishers were so enamoured of the original sample exercise books for the first Tom Gates story that they used her handwriting as the basis for a new font (Pichon Font, of course) that is used in the published works.

Pichon's books are gathering a critical as well as popular following and when the Red House Children’s Book Award shortlist for 2012 was published last week, it was no surprise to see The Brilliant World Of Tom Gates on there too.

Tom Gates is a master of excuses for not-done homework - his vexed relationship with teacher Mr Fullerman is a delight - and he has wonderful run-ins with Delia, his "weirdo big sister".

Above all, he is a doodler extraordinaire.

"That's definitely me," said Pichon. "In fact, I still have my St Augustine's School pencil case and it is absolutely covered in 30-year old doodles."