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}} Julia Catherine Donaldson MBE (born 16 September 1948) is an English writer, playwright and performer, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include ''The Gruffalo'', ''Room on the Broom'' and ''Stick Man''. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford Reading Tree. ==Early life== Donaldson (née Shields) was born in 1948 and brought up in Hampstead, London, with her younger sister Mary. The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath. Her parents, sister and their pet cat Geoffrey lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle on the first floor and her grandmother on the second floor. Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years. Jerry, who had studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp where his knowledge of German earned him the position of interpreter. Elizabeth, also a good German speaker with a degree in languages, meanwhile did war work in the Wrens. After the war they were reunited and married, and in 1950 they bought the Hampstead house together with Jerry's mother, his sister Beta and her husband Chris (the two men having met in the P.O.W. camp). When Donaldson was six her father contracted polio and thereafter was confined to a wheelchair, though he still led an active life, working as a lecturer in the Maudsley Hospital's Institute of Psychiatry, where he pioneered genetic studies using the model of identical twins brought up apart. Elizabeth worked as a part-time secretary and helped her boss, Leslie Minchin, translate German lieder into English. It was a household of music and song: Elizabeth sang with the Hampstead Choral Society, Jerry played the cello in amateur string quartets, and both parents were active members of the Hampstead Music Club. Summer holidays were at Grittleton House in Wiltshire, where Jerry played his cello in a summer school for chamber music, while Julia and Mary romped around and put on musical shows with the other children. Poetry also featured strongly in Donaldson’s early life; she was given ''The Book of a Thousand Poems'' by her father when she was five years old, and her grandmother introduced her to Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes. Donaldson attended New End Primary School and then Camden School for Girls. During her childhood and adolescence she acted (understudying the fairies in Shakespeare's ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' at The Old Vic where she made the acquaintance of a young Judi Dench and Tom Courtenay), sang with the Children's Opera Group, and learned the piano. A good linguist, she learnt French and German at school and later picked up Italian through a summer tutoring job with a family in Naples, so that by the age of 19 she had a good grasp of all three languages. 〔Malcolm Donaldson, 2012〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Julia Donaldson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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