Julia Donaldson Audiobooks

Dame Julia Donaldson (born 1948) is a British writer and playwright, and the dominant figure in modern children’s publishing by almost any measure. As of January 2025 she is Britain’s best-selling author outright, having overtaken J.K. Rowling by some 600,000 sales, and she served as Children’s Laureate from 2011 to 2013.

Her route in was delightfully sideways: she began by writing songs for children’s television, and only committed to books after the words of one song, ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, were turned into a children’s book in 1993. What followed is work on an industrial scale with none of the industrial feel – 184 published titles, including the rhyming stories that made her name, most famously those illustrated by Axel Scheffler such as The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man, alongside the Songbirds phonics scheme used in schools.

Donaldson began as a songwriter, and that is exactly what the ear picks up: rhythm, rhyme and repetition built for saying aloud, which makes her stories about as close to perfect audiobook material for young children as exists. The collections in our catalogue, The Gruffalo and Other Stories and The Snail and the Whale and Other Stories, bundle her best-loved tales into generous listens made for car journeys, bedtimes and the hundredth repeat request alike. For UK families these are less audiobooks than household institutions: stories most parents already half-know by heart, here given room to sing.