When Keir Starmer won a landslide Labour majority promising to pursue five governing “missions”, the high-profile leftwing economist Mariana Mazzucato was credited as an inspiration. Two years on, her bracing new book helps shed light on why Labour in power has struggled to project the sense of direction that “mission-led government”, as Mazzucato calls it, requires. Synthesising and extending her earlier work, here she proposes “a new economics of collective action around the common good”.

From this perspective, the economy is not a concatenation of rapacious independent forces, to be contained and offset by public policy, but a project – or rather a series of projects – with direction and purpose. Finance should be turned to the benefit of these collective goals instead of chasing short-term returns, she argues, and the creativity of corporations channelled to the public good.

As she puts it, “a common good framework for the economy is about aligning goals, incentivising collaboration, fostering collective intelligence, and ensuring that all participants share knowledge, risks and rewards”. That also means ditching what Mazzucato calls the “false narrative”, popular in parts of the environmental movement, that economic growth is antithetical to tackling the climate crisis.

The “compass” in the title is really a set of five principles, all of which Mazzucato says such an economy should have: purpose and “directionality”; co-creation by citizens; collective learning; reward sharing; and accountability. (Hikers might well balk at the idea of a five-point compass – and would certainly be well advised not to try to follow all of its directions at once).

Each of these principles is set out in detail. Co-creation implies grassroots participation in designing and redesigning government programmes, for example – because, “when people help define a problem and develop and implement solutions, they see them as theirs rather than something imposed on them”.

Reward sharing means ensuring the creators or rightful owners of economic value stand to benefit: from Indigenous people whose homes lie near raw material deposits, to social media users whose data fuels Big Tech’s profits.

That implies radical tax reform – including greater use of wealth taxes – and the robust use of conditions in public contracts, to make sure workers and taxpayers get their fair share: an approach she calls “predistribution”. “For example, companies benefiting from publicly funded health research should be forced to keep prices low and not create patents that are too wide and strong, leaving them hard to license.”

Aspects of the argument, including a positive role for the state as an enabler of innovation, are familiar from Mazzucato’s previous work, including her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State. But in this more comprehensive treatment she urges us to reject altogether the idea of patching up “market failures”, or treating social and economic problems as nasty but inevitable side-effects of economic growth, to be tackled with the odd taxpayer-funded side project – what she calls a “gap filling mode of thinking”.

According to Mazzucato’s definition, Labour’s attempt at mission-led government badly missed the mark. Its first and overriding goal – “kickstart economic growth” – cannot be a “mission” at all, because it lacks the necessary purpose. What, in other words, is that economic growth meant to be for?

At times, her exposition can be cumbersome. She takes us on a lengthy tour through economic history, from Aristotle via Adam Smith to Amartya Sen, slashing away at both mainstream theory and various past attempts at accommodating ideas of the collective good. The book’s own theories might be tempting to dismiss as utopian – too far away from the political economy we are stuck with – had she not scattered myriad practical examples throughout, though many are on a small scale.

“The seeds of transformation are everywhere,” she says, citing inspiring projects that range from delivering healthy and sustainable school meals in Sweden to the EU’s mission to support cities to become climate-neutral, to the international Nagoya Protocol on sharing the benefits of genetic resources and traditional knowledge.

Echoes of Mazzucato’s mindset are detectable in some Labour policies – from using the threat of legislation to cajole pension funds to invest more in UK assets, to writing conditions on youth training into clean energy contracts. But while her scope in this ambitious book is global, the analysis also dismantles Starmer’s claim to be pursuing national “missions”, by setting out just how radical – and radically different – that would look in practice.

Economies work best, she believes, when they pursue grand collective goals – developing and distributing a vaccine for a pandemic; or confronting the climate emergency (or, though she doesn’t lean on the example here, tooling up for a new and more frightening geopolitical era). We should ask, she says, “not which market failure do we want to be fixed, but what direction do we want the economy to sail in”.

The lawyer representing the Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams has said he too has been prevented from promoting her memoir under a legal ruling, after her silent appearance at the Hay festival.

Ravi Naik said the terms of an arbitration proceeding meant neither Wynn-Williams nor her “agents” could promote her bestselling book Careless People or say anything disparaging about the company.

Naik spoke after Wynn-Williams was forced to sit in silence during an appearance at Hay on Sunday owing to the terms of the ruling. Naik said an interim arbitration ruling meant she risked being forced to pay “punitive” damages if he promoted the book.

“Never in my life have I faced a circumstance where my client cannot speak about her truth and I as a lawyer cannot speak on behalf of my client,” he told BBC Radio’s Today programme on Monday.

Meta has claimed the book, which made a series of claims about the social media company’s behaviour and culture, is false and defamatory. It also contained allegations of sexual harassment that were denied by the company. Meta says Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.

Naik said Meta’s stance on Wynn-Williams’s Hay appearance was not a “hypothetical threat”.

Meta had said in writing that they considered Wynn-Williams’s attendance at the Hay talk would be a “breach” of the interim arbitration award, according to Naik, and they would seek sanctions if she promoted the book or criticised Meta in her appearance. Nail said Meta would probably seek to uphold the arbitration award, handed down in California, through the British courts.

Wynn-Williams was due to appear on stage in conversation with the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and the academic Tim Wu but spent the scheduled hour sitting in front of the audience without speaking. She was also unable to nod or shake her head.

Introducing the panel, Cadwalladr said: “I think this might be a Hay first, in which we have an author in a hostage situation. Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if [Mark] Zuckerberg is an asshole.”

In testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee last year, Wynn-Williams alleged Meta worked “hand in glove” with China over censorship tools – something the company has denied.

The Republican senator Josh Hawley claimed at the hearing that Wynn-Williams had been threatened with a fine of $50,000 (£37,000) every time she mentioned Facebook in public. However, the BBC reported that, according to Meta, she faced paying those damages for each violation of the separation agreement that she signed when she left the company in 2017.

The Labour MP Louse Haigh claimed last year that Wynn-Williams was being “pushed to financial ruin” by Meta’s legal stance.

Meta declined to comment directly on Wynn-William’s Hay appearance. It has previously described Careless People as a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

A few months ago, an AI researcher from Europe attended a dinner party in Silicon Valley. During one of the many courses, the host addressed his guests, all of whom worked in AI. The researcher paraphrased his message like this: “Isn’t it amazing that we are the last generation of humans who will need to think about procreating biologically? We were lucky enough to be born at a time where we can simply upload our consciousnesses instead.”

“I didn’t see that coming,” the researcher told me. “I was just enjoying my fish.”

But the host was serious. His words struck the researcher as the kind of comment a well-informed person might have made 100 years ago, once antibiotics had been invented: “Aren’t we lucky that we came after?”

Suddenly all the guests were talking about “mind children”, and the researcher turned to their neighbour to ask what this phrase meant. “He said, ‘Oh this is the book,’ and, ‘Haven’t you read the book?’ and, ‘Oh my God, you should really read the book.’”

The book in question was Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, which was first published in 1988, and which at the time, according to economist and futurist Robin Hanson of George Mason University, caused a big splash in a small pond – the community of robotics and machine-learning experts to which Moravec belonged.

Moravec’s book is more philosophical treatise than technological manual, but the central idea is that cultural evolution has long since taken over from biological evolution as the most powerful force shaping humanity, and the logical extrapolation of this is that the information that encodes our future selves would soon be packed into hardware and software rather than DNA. These mind children could be equipped with soft, squishy bodies, like real children, but they could also take a kaleidoscope of other physical – or indeed non-physical – forms.

Moravec observed that the ultimate consequences of this revolution were unknown, but he also appeared to welcome it. Within a century, he wrote, machines would exist “in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants”.

Hanson shares his conviction that the revolution is inevitable, as soon as AI attains something experts agree to call human-level intelligence. “We are going to generate an explosion of things like us in the future, who will be different from us in many ways,” Hanson says. “To the extent that they have minds somewhat like ours, they are our mind children.”

Angela Aristidou, who studies the real-life deployment of AI at University College London, is not surprised that Moravec’s book is enjoying a revival. She says that what in 1988 might have read like science fiction – and still might to most of us – looks eminently realisable to those in the know. Elon Musk’s pronatalist stance is the exception among tech types, she says, while the idea that the clock is ticking on biological reproduction is far more common – and the harbingers of that (perhaps self-fulfilling) prophecy are there for all to see. Delegates to this year’s Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California, a major AI conference, were treated to an AI avatar of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for example.

Then there’s the phenomenon of human-AI weddings. Such unions obviously can’t produce biological offspring, but since the human in the relationship has usually created their ideal romantic partner in the AI, Aristidou asks, rhetorically: “Why wouldn’t they also devise their ideal child?”.

In thinking about this post-biological future, though, we have to stretch our concept of “child”. The new entity could be an AI that human parents lovingly and jointly sculpt to meld the perceived best parts of themselves – as is already technically possible with gene editing in biological reproduction – but given that we’ll be doing away with birth, death and generations, as these concepts are ordinarily understood, it could also be something quite different.

A human could simply upload their own consciousness so that it outlives their physical shell, in which case the child is something closer to a clone. The human could transfer some of their consciousness into their AI companion, or conversely devise an AI companion that they perceived to be the opposite of themselves, in the belief that opposites attract. In all cases, a new entity emerges, but the line between self, partner and offspring is blurred. If that sounds incestuous, remember that there’s no risk of the medical conditions associated with inbreeding, though there could be others.

Aristidou doesn’t doubt that AIs can augment human relationships. They have been shown to be helpful as assistants in a therapeutic context, for example, or in overcoming loneliness. But she’s concerned about what happens when AIs become human substitutes. If a human can delete their AI spouse, she says: “How does that work as an equitable marriage the way we understand it?”

She also worries that a two-tier society will emerge, in which a tech-savvy, well-resourced elite customises its AI creations for high realism, maintaining control over their settings and updates, while everybody else has to make do with cheaper, off-the-shelf products that place them at the whim of developers – “as if there’s three entities in this relationship: the human, the AI companion, the AI developer”. Among the many ethical, legal and practical issues this throws up is whether the developer would be considered a co-parent to a mind child.

Hanson says there are legal scholars and ethicists thinking about such things, but until society takes its postbiological future seriously, the safeguards they are proposing have no hope of being debated, let alone implemented.

Nor is anybody discussing arguably the thorniest issue of all: is humanity staring down its own last act? Hanson says that the emergence of more complex lifeforms doesn’t necessitate the extinction of older, simpler ones – or there’d be no more bacteria on Earth. But if that thought strikes you as less than reassuring, take a leaf out of Moravec’s book and focus on the positives. “Very little need be lost in this passing of the torch,” he wrote in 1988. “[It] will be in our artificial offspring’s power, and to their benefit, to remember almost everything about us, even perhaps, the detailed workings of individual human minds.”

Further reading

Empire of AI by Karen Hao, (Penguin, £12.99)

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson, (Oxford University Press,£12.49)

Mind Children by Hans Moravec, Harvard University Press, £31.95)

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Picador, £16.99)
Kawakami’s latest opens with a bang, as narrator Hana learns that her old friend Kimiko has been charged with abduction. This MacGuffin takes us to their friendship in late-1990s Tokyo, when teen Hana and the older woman open a bar called Lemon: “Yellow attracts money.” But it’s a turbulent ride and soon Hana is in a world of organised crime. “The world is crazy. I feel like I’m living in a manga.” She’s not the only one, and you need an appetite for Kawakami’s style, which prefers to explore rather than explain – people come and go, buildings burn down, cancer is diagnosed, almost at random – but the relentless rush means there’s no time to get bored. At its best – as in a scene where Hana’s unreliable mother wants to borrow 2m yen for investment in lingerie that helps “your spine and organs move back to where they’re supposed to be” – this is a story both absurd and horrifying.

All Flesh by Ananda Devi, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Pushkin, £12.99)
“Forgive me for starting this story with bodily, unpalatable origins.” You may as well – it’s all like that. In an unnamed European country, a schoolgirl “born with no urge but to consume” is getting bigger and bigger. “My gut, my ass, my thighs – they were all set on reaching the farthest corners of the world.” She blames her gluttony on the need to silence the voice of her dead twin sister, who was “absorbed into my tissues” in the womb. She hates school, where other kids mock her, as though her own self-disgust weren’t enough. After a blackly comic scene where she gets stuck in her bedroom doorframe like “an uncooperative cork”, she falls in love with the lonely carpenter who arrives to widen the door – but there are more twists to come. This powerful story is deeply physical, but driven by a compelling voice describing the torment of a girl who is “the psychical mirror of our time … immoderation made manifest”.

The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco, translated by Rosalind Harvey (Granta, £14.99)
This unpredictable book, comprising five linked stories about a Spanish couple, opens with the end of the world and gets weirder from there. A balloon debate about a post-apocalyptic scenario turns nasty when one participant pulls a knife, or thinks he does. A plane crash-lands on an island. “Can [we] go and get our luggage … Lots of people have, you know, soiled themselves.” What links the scenes is a sense of disconnection in our connected world, but the book subverts expectations: when a group of people celebrating New Year’s Eve go missing, it turns out to be a game of hide and seek. Footnotes peppered throughout suggest we’re viewing all this from the future (“Emirates was a well-known passenger airline …”), and discovering what the white desert is turns everything on its head. For readers who like to do their own joining up, and who want a playful, original take on our precarious lives, this is a thought-provoking treat.

The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Harvill, £16.99)
“You could have waited, you bastards.” In 1942 Lapland, a village occupied by the semi-nomadic Sámi people is flooded by a new hydroelectric plant’s dam. One family watch as their goahti (peat-covered hut) disappears under the water. “It wasn’t the nicest goahti,” says Ánne. “No, but it was mine,” says her sister Rávdná. When Rávdná wants to build a house to replace it, the authorities refuse permission: the Sámi way of life has been rejected but alternatives are not permitted. A local newspaper half-heartedly offers to publicise their case, but “we receive a lot of angry letters if we use any foreign words”. When the government tells local people the new dam “will lift us out of poverty and injustice”, the words reek with irony. This intimate story of infuriating discrimination is, Labba says, based on real events in Sweden.

Sajid Javid said that supporting Liz Truss in the Conservative leadership contest that ultimately made her prime minister was his “biggest mistake in politics”.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales while promoting his memoir, the former chancellor, who is no longer an MP, said there were friends in the Conservative party he remained in contact with.

Asked whether he still speaks to Truss, Javid responded: “No. I said ‘friends’.” Broadcaster Aasmah Mir then asked: “Hang on a minute, did you not back her in the first leadership election?” to which Javid replied: “Biggest mistake in politics.”

After Boris Johnson’s resignation in 2022, Javid initially launched his own campaign for the Conservative leadership before backing Truss after being eliminated from the contest. Truss’s premiership lasted just 49 days in 2022 after her government’s disastrous mini-budget.

Javid, who stood down as an MP at the 2024 election, was also asked by Mir what he thought of the swathe of Tory MPs defecting to Reform, to which he responded simply: “Good riddance.”

He also argued that the quality of Britain’s political class had deteriorated in recent years. He said: “Has the calibre of politicians declined in recent years? Yes. I think dramatically. But it would be unfair … to blame that just on the politicians. The politicians reflect what you vote for.

“Ultimately, the calibre of the politicians is on the people. If you want different politicians, you’ve got to vote differently – not just think about their party label or whatever – but also just about what kind of person they are, what’s really motivating them.”

Javid, who is now a partner at an investment firm, made the case for increasing MPs’ pay, saying: “We don’t pay politicians enough to attract people from the top of their game – and that could be a head teacher, it could be an accountant, it could be a doctor – to leave their jobs and say, you know what, I want to serve my country.

“So to some extent, you get what you pay for … We should half the number of MPs and double their salaries.”

Javid served in a number of cabinet roles under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, including as home secretary and chancellor. He later returned to government as health secretary under Johnson before stepping down in July 2022, amid a wave of resignations that ultimately led to the end of Johnson’s premiership.

After resigning as an MP before the 2024 general election, Javid became a partner at Centricus, a private equity and asset manager based in Mayfair founded by his former colleagues at Deutsche Bank. He also works as chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.

Eventually the centre will become home to Blake’s own enormous archive: 40,000 drawings created by one of the UK’s best-known and most immediately recognisable artists. Now 93, Blake has spent three-quarters of a century bringing the words of some of our most beloved authors to life. Roald Dahl is the big one, of course – it’s impossible to think of Dahl without seeing Blake’s energetic, dip-pen pictures – but the list also includes Michael Rosen, John Yeoman, Sylvia Plath and Voltaire, as well as Blake’s own books. In other words, it’s difficult to find anyone with the same authority.

“More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,” Blake explains. “What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.”

For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you think of The Twits, the likelihood is that you think of Blake’s wild, scratchy depictions. To imagine Funnybones is to see Janet Ahlberg’s deceptively simplistic pictures before Allan Ahlberg’s words. Go on any of Forestry England’s Gruffalo walks and it will be Axel Scheffler’s designs (rather than Julia Donaldson’s text) that loom out at you from between the trees.

“We are a bit in the shadow,” says Scheffler. “Our books are called picture books, so we are an important part of the process. It’s a very underestimated art form, the author and illustrator creating something together. It’s hard to separate.”

“The shortest time I’ve ever spent writing a picture book was an hour, typing it into my phone on an aeroplane,” says author-illustrator Sarah McIntyre, “but they always take at least three or four months of intensive work to illustrate, nine or more hours a day, six days a week.”

McIntyre has done more than most to highlight how badly illustrators are overlooked. A decade ago she launched the Pictures Mean Business campaign, to push for illustrators to receive proper credit for their work. In doing so, she helped to resolve a misunderstanding of what a picture book actually is.

Having written them myself, I know how completely specific they are. Almost always 32 pages long, and almost always read to a child by a caregiver before they can read themselves, most picture books exist at the precise point where the text and illustration meet. Remove either component and the whole thing falls apart.

“I think illustrating a story is one of the primal human instincts,” says Huw Aaron, whose book Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob won the Waterstones children’s book prize this year. “We don’t know if people were dancing or singing 40,000 years ago, but we do know they were making comics about people chasing cows, because they’re all over cave walls.”

The things an illustrator can do to a text are as varied as they are wonderful. Jim Field, illustrator of Kes Gray’s Oi Frog! and Rachel Bright’s The Lion Inside, sees illustration as an extra layer. “I’m not trying to do exactly what the words are saying,” he says. “I’m trying to weave in sort of extra subplots or let the reader learn more about the character.”

Matty Long, creator of Super Happy Magic Forest – a series that has crossed from picture books to chapter books to television – puts it even more bluntly. “If the words are just describing the picture, then why have you got the words?” he says. “I want the images to do the bulk of the storytelling.”

But sometimes an illustrator can go even further than this. In I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen performs the magic trick of telling two different stories at once. Read without images, the book is simply the tale of a bear fruitlessly inquiring after his lost headwear. But the illustrations provide a context that runs slightly counter to this. The bear, so polite written down, is actually fuelled by murderous revenge.

“It seems to be where the truth of the thing should live,” says Klassen of the tension between words and pictures. “I usually end up putting a half truth in the words, or leaving a lot of things out. I think that helps with kids because, when the text is outright incorrect, they can see that the pictures are telling the truth.”

Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. “I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,” explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. “He asked some children what ‘indignant’ meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just ‘angry’ or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.”

For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to “proper” books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that “you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.”

“Children have got the most sophisticated little minds,” says Lauren Child, creator of Charlie and Lola. “They might be tiny, but they’re really big thinkers. They’re so visually smart in ways that adults aren’t. We use visual cues and aesthetics our whole life, but we lose that edge that we have when we first arrive.”

A picture book might be the first time a child is able to identify and name a big emotion they are experiencing. Nadia Shireen’s book Barbara Throws a Wobbler uses bright and colourful images to depict feelings outside the written word. “We have a period in the book where Barbara actually talks to the Wobbler, and it all got very metaphysical,” she says. “I had to say to my editor: ‘Is this mad? Are we expecting three-year-olds to go on a psychological journey?’”

Sometimes, illustration can even help a book become a tool for storytelling, allowing children to become co-authors. In Jon Burgerman’s Splat!, for example, readers get to blast the protagonist in the face with various new and disgusting objects with every page turn. “I wanted to make a book that could only be a book,” says Burgerman. “I really celebrated the form of a picture book, and I wanted to make something that couldn’t be realised in any other form.”

Meanwhile, Is This a Plum? by Dan Ojari and his son Finn makes clever use of cutouts to hide objects in plain sight. “Someone sent me a video of their kid, who can’t read, and they are telling the story to their parents because the words are so simple,” Ojari says. “It has that feeling of ‘I know more than my parent, and I’m going to trick them.’”If all this makes picture book illustration sound rather grand, the process itself often begins in the least grand way imaginable: with a doodle. “The drawing has to come first,” says Long, holding up an early sketch of a Super Happy Magic Forest character that, even in its nascent stage, still manages to contain all the elements of the character’s core personality. “I have to convince myself that there’s an idea there worth pursuing, and I do that through the drawing.”

Sue Hendra does the same, showing me her first sketch of the character Supertato, which she created with Paul Linnet and spun off into a mini empire consisting of 15 books and counting. Her sketch depicts a potato flying above a city. Unsure of writing a book about what appears to be an apocalyptically large spud, the sketch taught them that they needed to reframe Supertato’s world. “Paul suggested a supermarket, because it’s a city in miniature with products from all over the world coming in. It just created this lovely boundary, which felt really safe and secure.”

“If I had my notebook I’d show you the first picture of Hiccup that I drew 30 years ago,” says Cressida Cowell, author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series. “It was of this little Viking trying to live up to his father. That was the very first germ of something that spawned 12 books, a movie series and a theme park. Just a little pencil drawing!”

Characters are also everything for Jamie Smart, whose Bunny vs Monkey books sit at the heart of the current comic book boom in publishing. Their appeal is vast, and much of this is to do with how replicable the characters are. “When I do workshops for kids, I always start at the very beginning. I go: ‘Draw a square and draw a circle, and now you can pretty much draw any character in Bunny vs Monkey,’” he says. “For a child, telling stories can be quite intimidating, because you have to know all the words that you’re going to need. But if you can tell a story with a couple of lines and a smiley face, what a gift.”

Arguably nobody knows this better than Rob Biddulph, whose Draw With Rob videos – teaching children step by step to replicate his artwork – elevated him to national treasure status during lockdown. “I think it’s the thing I’m proudest of in my career,” he says. “Sure, it was on a screen, but you can use that screen to do something practical and physical. Kids were watching me on YouTube, but they were actually doing something on a piece of paper that they could then stick up on the fridge.”

If picture books ask a lot of children, they also often demand an unusual act of trust from the adults who create them. “I think an author and an illustrator need to share a similar sense of things, a sense of humour, a sense of drama,” says Blake. “But it is better if their views of things are not exactly the same; one needs to complement the other.”

When illustrating someone else’s work, the first thing Blake does is scrutinise the manuscript. “First of all, I need to get to know the characters as well as possible and imagine what they look like,” he says. “After that, it’s a question of finding suitable moments that will attract the reader but not anticipate the writer. For instance, there is one dramatic moment in Roald Dahl’s Matilda where the dreadful Miss Trunchbull hits Bruce Bogtrotter over the head with a plate. I showed her raising the plate in the air over the unfortunate boy, leaving the dramatic conclusion to Roald himself.”

This is a skill in itself. Maxwell Oginni illustrated My Rice Is Best, which was published last year and picked up a glut of award nominations. However, he comes from an animation background, where every I can’t speak for other authors, but the moment I first receive artwork from my illustrators (Nicola Slater for picture books, Vincent Batignole for chapter books) is often the moment where a story starts to feel more like a book. Both of them delight in adding background details – shopfronts, references, unimpressed background characters – that give the stories a richness they would otherwise lack. And they still surprise. “I love to add references to my favourite films, video games or manga,” says Batignole. “Plus I think there’s at least one Spice Girls reference in every book I’ve ever worked on.” This, it’s fair to say, is news to me.

“I don’t tell anyone about this, but I create a backstory for every character,” reveals Slater. “It might have no bearing on the story, but it helps to set the scene and their motivations, and it informs the way the book goes.”

“The best children’s writers know that they can leave lots of things to the illustrator,” explains Nick Sharratt, who has illustrated books for Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson. “Sometimes you’ve got to let the pictures do their job.”

A much more high-stakes author-illustrator relationship is the one that exists between Lydia Corry and Sally Gardner. This is because Gardner is Corry’s mum. Although they worked together on the gorgeous Tindims series, it wasn’t always the case. “When I was a lot younger I illustrated a tiny picture on the front of her book I, Coriander, and she really didn’t like it,” Corry says. “Now she has the painting in her house, but she was so attached to the story, and the visual thing was all in her head. So you do get nervous about whether or not it’s what the author wants.”

One way to assuage these nerves is to do everything yourself. There are no end of authors who illustrate their own work, allowing them a level of control over the finished product that the rest of us will never experience.

Best known for his Bunny v Monkey series, Jamie Smart loves that this approach leaves less space for reader misinterpretation, especially when making a comic. “I’m literally saying: ‘Here is this character, here is this joke, here is this bit of story,’ and it’s all laid out for you to see,” he says.

But even author-illustrators have their limits of control. “When you publish a book, you are giving it up completely,” says Debi Gliori, creator of classics including No Matter What. “You can’t stand behind people and go, ‘I think you should slow down,’ or ‘I think you should read that bit in a squeaky voice.’” Although illustrations can be used to almost any end, nearly everyone I speak to returns, sooner or later, to the same essential quality: joy. “I am very serious about being silly,” says Hendra, seriously. “Humour is so underestimated, especially for children. But if you arm a child with a love of being silly, it’s like a survival skill.” And this is a theme that runs across many of the illustrators I spoke to. Sarah Horne, who has illustrated books for Sam Copeland and Gianna Pollero, sees her job as “getting some silliness and joy into books”, while Smart’s wild energy makes him want to “stretch all the characters out and push them out of the panels”. McIntyre says that one of the most talked about details in her Adventuremice books is a picture of a character “sitting on the toilet, with a tiny poo floating into space. That doesn’t really need words.”

But even silliness takes craft. When Sue Hendra is finished with a book she will read it over and over from different viewpoints – a child, a teacher, a knackered parent – to make sure the rhythm is correct. Lauren Child tinkers with her books right up until her deadline. “I’ve just delivered a picture book, and we were still taking words out right up until the last minute,” she says.

Rob Biddulph does the same, removing any words that the pictures can communicate more clearly. “I write the story as a poem, so the tendency is to put everything that you want to happen in that story into the verse,” he says. “But an illustration will get the exact intention of the story across. Pictures paint a thousand words, as they say.”

The opening of the Quentin Blake Centre is a great indication that we have come a long way in recognising our incredible history of illustration, and the mountains of talent we have produced. But there is still a way to go. “Did you know that, unlike writers, illustrators still have no easily accessible sales data?” asks McIntyre. “While Julia Donaldson is a quantifiably bestselling author, Axel Scheffler doesn’t have any numbers for their books together. He doesn’t carry any of that sales data with him. This has a huge trickle-down effect on how illustrators are perceived.”

One thing that resonated throughout these interviews was how much of a privilege it is to be able to create books for children. For some illustrators, it offers an opportunity to tap back into the memory of bedtime stories with their children. For others, it’s the thrill of seeing a book that has been worn out through sheer use. Some view illustration as an intellectual challenge, others as a way of providing clarity on the state of the world. But all of them agreed on one thing: underestimate children at your peril.

The last question I ask Blake is why characters made for children have the potential to stick in the public consciousness for decades. “We feel we can relate to them,” he answers. “In a sense, they become our friends.”

My earliest reading memory
I’m not sure what we were reading – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams or the poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – but I was undoubtedly with my sister, two years older, who set the example for me to be a reader. I picture us in the back of our family car or laying across our twin beds in the room we shared.

My favourite book growing up
I loved mysteries and fantasy worlds. I read so many of the Nancy Drew books, and The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. And I loved the Narnia stories and The Wind in the Willows. I loved books about things that can’t exist. I suppose it’s all escapism – crimes solved by children, talking animals, time travel, people two inches tall. I always loved to slip into another, better world.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath at 15. It was my first real understanding of what fiction can do, how far a story can go, how words can be put to the intricacies of living. It stretched my empathy, seeing what the Joad family endured, learning through story what had happened in that place and time in American history.

The writer who changed my mind
Joan Didion. Every time I read her work, I am changed in some way. Her writing makes me think of the world, people, politics, the land, water, time, motherhood, marriage differently.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was in college and majoring in English and creative writing. I read Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and I discovered what can be done with language and words to make something beautiful and compelling. I thought: I have to do this, I can do this, I will do this.

The author I came back to
I tried Jane Austen too young. I didn’t understand the language or the story. I felt lost. When I came back to Pride and Prejudice in my late 20s, I enjoyed it tremendously.

The books I reread
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Steinbeck’s East of Eden are the books I read again and again, and in fact I’m due for a pass of East of Eden right about now.

The book I could never read again
I devoured the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, but was terrified throughout. I have considered going back, but I was so disturbed by it I don’t think I will.

The book I discovered later in life
I didn’t read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott until just before the 2019 film, and I wept through the scenes of Jo trying to make it as an author. It hit so close, and of course I had not made it. I was still spreading the pages across the floor in hope and despair. I had my own children by then, and identified so much with the girls’ mother – something that would not have happened if I’d read it when I was young.

The book I am currently reading
While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. This is a reread for me. I discovered Miller 15 years ago, just walking through a used book store and looking at spines. I love her stories, especially some of those older ones. I love the eerie undercurrent of the book and the construction of the whole thing – from the story arc down to the sentences.

My comfort read
Can I pick a few? The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

The 4thWrite prize, an annual short story competition for Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers run by publisher 4th Estate and the Guardian, has opened for submissions.

The winner will receive £1,000, a one-day publishing workshop at 4th Estate and publication of their story on the Guardian website. The shortlisted stories will be published on the 4th Estate website. The prize is open to writers aged 18 and over living in the UK or Ireland.

This is the 10th year of the prize. Last year’s winner was Piyumi Kapugeekiyana for The Original Is Not Here. Several previous longlisted and shortlisted writers have gone on to publish books: Bolu Babalola, author of Love in Colour and Honey & Spice; Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City; Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions; Gurnaik Johal, author of We Move; and Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill.

Past winners include Yan F Zhang for Fleeting Marrow in 2024 and Yian Yi for The Good Son in 2023.

This year’s judging panel includes agent Emma Paterson of Aitken Alexander Associates, writer and journalist Chanté Joseph, novelists Sanam Mahloudji and Kamila Shamsie, 4th Estate publishing director Kishani Widyaratna and Guardian commissioning editor Ella Creamer. Johal, who was shortlisted for the prize in 2018, joins the panel this year as a guest judge to mark the anniversary.

Johal said being shortlisted for the prize began his writing career. “I remember feeling emboldened to take writing seriously when I entered my short story,” he said.

Shamsie described the award as “an effective spotlight” for emerging writers in the decade since it was launched, while Widyaratna called the prize “an essential part of the literary ecosystem”.

Joseph said: “I know firsthand how rare it is to see your story reflected in the publishing landscape, and how much will and motivation it takes to keep pushing when you’re a person of colour in this space. It is such an honour and a privilege to be judging the 4thWrite prize.”

The deadline for submissions is 19 June. The longlist will be announced by 31 August, the shortlist by 30 September and the winner in October at a ceremony in London.

• Submissions can be made at www.4thEstate.co.uk/prize, where full terms and conditions are available. Any queries can be sent to 4thWritePrize@harpercollins.co.uk