Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My customers My castaway this week is the writer Francesca Simon. Horrid Henry, her grubby little

tyke of a creation, has helped her sell 17 million books. Horrid Henry's underpants and Horrid Henry

robs the bank give something of a clue to his appeal.

He's naughty, very naughty, and rude and revolting.

In other words, every parent's nightmare and every child's fantasy of how they'd like to behave,

given half the chance.

Unlike her creation, it would seem that growing up Francesca was a very good girl indeed.

Despite attending 10 schools by the time she was 12, she got into Yale and Oxford and unlike most women it was becoming a mother that

unlocked massive career success. She says my son allowed me to discover where my

talents lay as a writer. For most women Francesca it's the

absolute opposite. The child means that their work tends to go on the back burner

take second place. Tell us what is your secret? I don't know that it's a secret. It was just a

very unexpected thing that happened to me and that I was always interested in writing but

I was a journalist and having Josh and looking after him meant that we spend a lot of time reading.

I just discovered that I had a talent for writing children's books.

To people who are not familiar and as I say 17 million books have been sold so quite a lot of people are familiar but for people who are not if I was to describe horrid Henry as a sort of Dennis the Menace for today with is that about right or does that make you sort of shiver a bit that comparison?

It doesn't make me shiver. I mean he is a kind of archetypal, anarchic character and

children's literature kind of filled with these sort of wild imaginative kids.

What he does is he doesn't think about consequences.

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