You are viewing your 1 free article this month.
Sign in to make the most of your access to expert book trade coverage.
Tom Percival on the final book in his Big Bright Feelings series and what comes next
With the 9th title in his Big Bright Feelings series due this summer and a new magical adventures project in the works, the children’s writer shows no signs of slowing down.
Tom Percival might have been illustrating and writing children’s books for almost 20 years, but this will be his first Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Speaking from inside his writing shed, Percival sounds upbeat at the prospect of joining the molto bene throng inside the BolognaFiere Exhibition Centre. “I’m hoping it’ll be a big jolly and I can sit around and eat ice cream, but my diary is looking pretty full,” he says.
It’s been a busy few months for Percival. He’s been wrapping up his Big Bright Feelings (Bloomsbury) series, which has sold more than 1.6 million English-language copies. He also spent last month promoting Squirrel and Duck: Mission Improbable (Bloomsbury), the first in a black and white illustrated fiction series for children aged six and over, while putting the finishing touches on the second and third books in the series, Invasion of the Doggy-Snatchers (publishing in August) and Quack to the Future, which will hit bookshelves in March 2026.
In February, he won the Ruth Rendell Award, an accolade given to authors who champion literacy, for his 2024 novel The Wrong Shoes (Simon & Schuster), which explores child poverty. It’s an issue close to Percival’s heart and he credits his mum, who was a school librarian, with teaching him about the transformative nature of reading (£1 from the sale of every hardback edition of The Wrong Shoes goes to the National Literacy Trust).
Percival explains that the Ruth Rendell Award was “particularly amazing” because he had no idea he had been entered for it. “The first I knew about it was when I was told I was on the shortlist,” he says. Percival’s work, both in terms of the stories he writes and illustrates as well as the work he does with the National Literacy Trust, is motivated partly by his own childhood, when he and his family, based in south Shropshire, lived in a caravan. “I had a pretty turbulent childhood. It was challenging. I was often quite scared. I grew up acutely aware of people’s feelings; how they do and don’t deal with their own feelings and the massive effect that has on the people around them,” he says.
This insight into how children think and how the emotions of those that surround them can have an impact resulted in the Big Bright Feelings series: a collection of stories for younger children characterised by wonderfully vibrant colours and friendly child protagonists, the first of whom is Perfectly Norman, a boy who has wings. They are distinct but non-specific stories charting how children get through challenges, from parental separation to anger or neurodivergence.
Percival, who has two teenage children, says: “When I had children I had to be incredibly mindful of how I was feeling, because to them, I knew I was this huge looming figure. Even though I might just be a bit frustrated, to a small child that can be really frightening. When my children were born I thought a lot about my own personal feelings and the feelings I had as a child. This isn’t to say that I have had every issue that faces the Big Bright Feelings children. But, to be honest, I have experienced quite a lot of them.”
Continues...
Read More
Percival trained as a graphic designer and started out in advertising. “I quickly realised that [working at a creative agency] wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to work through the ranks and become a creative director. I remember being in a meeting where they were talking about trying to increase dwell time for gambling websites. I said something like: ‘I don’t feel good about doing that, because these people are vulnerable.’ One of the people involved asked me if I might be working in the wrong industry,” he says.
From that point on, Percival says, it was a case of getting out of advertising. He started doing freelance graphic-design work for HarperCollins. “I did a few jobs well, and then it got to the point that they asked me to come in two days a week… I worked across adult fiction, non-fiction, a bit of children’s. We acted like an in-house ad agency for HarperCollins.”
Making the leap from graphic design into illustration and then writing was a mixture of opportunism and undeniable talent. “I had friends and colleagues in different departments of HarperCollins. The editor of the Skulduggery Pleasant series, Nick Lake, mentioned they were struggling to find an illustrator for the cover. I said: ‘Let me have a read of the manuscript and I’ll see if I can do anything.’ I read it and I thought, this is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to do. As a teenager I’d wanted to make comic books and graphic novels and had obsessively read the magazine 2000 AD.”
Percival’s illustrations were a hit with Skulduggery Pleasant’s author Derek Landy and the rest of the team. “Those books ended up becoming a big thing,” says Percival. “It’s classic, but when you’ve been involved in something successful, doors that had been closed begin opening. People in publishing began to ask if I had any ideas. I was like: ‘Yes, yes I do.’”
The visually arresting nature of the Big Bright Feelings books is perhaps unsurprising given Percival’s design background. “The design is really important to me. It’s not only my vision; Goldy Broad is the art director and she’s fantastic. I carefully consider the narrative impact of the design. These things are all the same: illustration, writing, music, it’s all storytelling.”
Percival left London in 2009 and relocated to Bristol, but carried on commuting to work at HarperCollins. About 10 years ago he and his family moved to Stroud, a market town in Gloucestershire. “It’s such a vibrant, creative place. There are so many amazingly talented musicians, artists and other people making creative work.” It’s a town that speaks to Percival’s multi-hyphenate creative nature: “I make music, I play in bands, I take photographs, I write books, I illustrate books. If I could, I would dance, but I can’t. I just love any form of expression in any sort of medium.” The author even built his writing shed out of “random bits of wood” he recovered from a skip.
Big Bright Feelings is ending with the publication of Percival’s 10th book in the series, Hanna Asks for Help, this summer. He is already working on a new picture-book series for Bloomsbury, having had four books acquired by editorial director of illustrated publishing Pari Thomson, which the publisher says will “build on the success of Big Bright Feelings”. Percival is “terrifically excited” about this new project and says the new books will be “magical adventures” involving two recurring characters.
When asked about what’s next, Percival grins. “I’ve got four ideas for novels and I want to write all of them. The hours in the day are my challenge, because I don’t have enough of them,” he says. “In particular, I want to explore the idea of masculinity. People seem to find it so challenging and confusing. You’re expected to be like this and be like that… I want to write a book that shows masculinity and what some people think of as classically masculine traits in a positive way, to counter the idea that you’re either a total pushover or subscribe to Andrew Tate.”
Metadata
Publication 17th July 2025
Formats HB (9781526673923, £12.99), PB (9781526673947, £7.99)
Agent Mandy Suhr, StoryWise
Editor Pari Thomson
