How “The Gruffalo” went global

When Julia Donaldson set out to write a children’s book featuring a mouse—who would take a stroll through “the deep dark wood”, fending off a series of predators with wit and cunning—she intended him to meet a tiger for tea. Ms Donaldson, a British author who wrote songs for children’s television, had been inspired by a Chinese fable about a girl who escapes death by convincing a tiger that she is the queen of the forest. But there was a problem: Ms Donaldson wanted the book to be in rhyming couplets, and not a lot rhymes with tiger. She decided it would be more pragmatic for the beast’s name to end with the sound “oh”. And so, with the help of Axel Scheffler, a German illustrator, one of the most lucrative monsters in children’s publishing was born.