3 weeks ago
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February 10, 2026 — 12:00pm
Growing up, Andy Griffiths was fascinated by an adult who said his favourite food was hot ice-cream. “I thought, well, yeah, but how can it be ice-cream? If it’s hot, it’s not ice-cream.”
But those paradoxes are exactly what your imagination builds on, Griffiths says. His best-selling Treehouse books, created with illustrator Terry Denton, are full of absurdities like that.
Now, as the Children’s Laureate, the best-selling author is on a mission to encourage families to read together.
Griffiths takes over the role from Sally Rippin. As a national ambassador for reading and Australian children’s literature, the laureate champions issues affecting the entire industry, including creators, reading advocates, educators, librarians, booksellers and publishers. Every laureate has a mission for their term; for Griffiths, it is “Reading is an Adventure”.
What children want to read is adventure, fantasy, and humour, he says. Those elements have remained fairly constant since his first book was published in 1997.
“They’re the things I responded to as a kid. I just wanted to have my mind blown - as it says in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘to imagine six impossible things before breakfast’, that’s a great day. And I know I used to chew on things that didn’t make any sense, like hot ice-cream.”
What they’re really loving is the playfulness, he says. When a book that sparks their interest, they’re engaging with possibility.
“Underneath all the silliness is really saying you are free to think anything you can imagine, anything with possibility and wonder, and that often triggers them to run off and start writing and drawing their own wacky, wonderful stories and cartoons and comic strips. I’ve given them permission by being silly myself for them to be silly and free.”
Griffiths is the author of 43 books and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. These include the Treehouse series, the Just! series, the BUM trilogy – including The Year My Bum Went Psycho – and, more recently, the YOU & ME series, illustrated by Bill Hope.
His 44th, titled Let’s Go!, is an activities book illustrated by Hope and will be released on February 24, with stories, poems and comics designed to allow children to create their own imaginary adventures.
In Western society, we tend to devalue creativity, Griffiths says. “There’s very little emphasis or even overt content on imagination. This is something that we neglect to our detriment.”
As children’s laureate from 2018-19, Morris Gleitzman’s mission was to get adults to read children’s books. Griffiths wants to encourage families to read together for the joy of it.
“A large part of the benefit of that is getting in touch with your childhood self, that little part of you that wonders and dreams and doesn’t have everything figured out and can be just lost in the shapes that you see in the clouds, that has no overt value, but has enormous enrichment for your life.”
“I think kids want to go to Where the Wild Things Are,” he says, referencing Maurice Sendak’s much-loved classic. “And to take them there requires a little bit of skill because you don’t want to terrify them and give them psychological trauma. You’ve got to give them a safe place in the world,” he says.
“But then you’ve got to take them somewhere dangerous and let them experience that vicarious thrill of terror, just like any child will enjoy a scary game, like a baby will enjoy peekaboo, that slight surprise and slight scare is very pleasurable. And then to see the characters fighting through impossible tasks and impossible challenges, and usually winning.
“Even if they don’t win, they’ve fought. That’s something we all love to see – someone trying against the odds to solve a problem, and that can be a very positive underlying message, which fosters feelings of encouragement and empowerment for a young child.”
Appointed every two years to promote the power of reading, the Children’s Laureate travels the country meeting children, families, educators, librarians and politicians.
“Children’s books are a way to enrich your children, to ensure that they have imagination, that they gain skills of literacy, which open doors in all sorts of ways. That’s what you really want for your kids,” Griffiths says. “To have the courage to follow what makes you happy, what really rings your bell, is another skill that we need to foster as well.”
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