Cressida Cowell Audiobooks

Dragons, Vikings and one more chapter: the How to Train Your Dragon Collection

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Who is Cressida Cowell?

Cressida Cowell is a British author, born in 1966, whose name is now bound up with one of the most successful children’s series of modern times. How to Train Your Dragon began life as a book series and grew into a full media franchise once DreamWorks Animation took it to the screen; by 2015 the books alone had sold more than seven million copies around the world. That kind of reach changes how a writer is read, but the books remain the foundation of it all.

Dragons are not the whole story. Cowell also works with the illustrator Neal Layton on the ongoing Emily Brown series for younger readers, and the first of those, That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, won a Nestle Children’s Book Award. It is a useful corrective to the idea that she is a one-franchise author: the same storytelling instincts work at picture-book scale just as well as across a sprawling saga.

Cressida Cowell in audiobooks

For families, the How to Train Your Dragon Collection is the natural way into Cowell’s world in audio: the series gathered together for long car journeys, school holidays and bedtimes that keep overrunning by one more chapter. Children who arrived via the DreamWorks films will find the original books have a flavour of their own, and hearing them read aloud puts the emphasis back where it belongs, on the storytelling.

Series listening has a practical virtue too. Once a child is hooked, the next instalment is already queued up, which makes a collection like this one of the more reliable investments a listening household can make.