The Wild Robot movie from DreamWorks Animation (based on my book) was released in September of 2024 and was a massive success. At one point it was the #1 most watched movie in the world, and went on to earn multiple Golden Globe nominations and Academy Award nominations. In addition to the original version of my book, we also published a Movie-Tie-In edition of the book, which has movie art on the cover and 8-pages of full-color still images from the movie, otherwise this edition is the same as the original. My love of animation is what first made me… 

In 2016 I published my first children’s novel, The Wild Robot. It’s the story of a robot named Roz and her struggle to survive on a remote, wild island. As it turns out, Roz doesn’t just survive, she adapts, and learns to communicate with the wildlife, and then she develops animal friends and even a family. Roz makes the island her home. But that wasn’t the whole story. You see, from the moment I started dreaming up The Wild Robot, I was also dreaming up the sequel. It would be another survival story, only this time Roz would have to… 

So, I wrote my first children’s novel. It wasn’t a graceful process, but I survived the stress and the solitude and the crippling self-doubt, and now my novel has entered the world. It’s called The Wild Robot. If you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it. Back in 2008, while working on a picture book called The Curious Garden, I spent a lot of time making sketches like this- I loved imagining scenes of nature living in surprising places. And that got me thinking about scenes of unnatural things living in surprising places, and I made…