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Getting into writing and illustrating books was actually just a logical tangent in my journey. A lot of the art that I was making was very narrative. You were seeing the moments of a story. And one idea that I had for a painting was somebody trying to physically catch a star. I thought that could make a great series of paintings. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to go from a series of canvases depicting parts of a story to jumping into doing a book [Jeffers’ first book was How to Catch a Star]. And once I sort of made that transition, everything really flowed quite naturally from there.  

2022: Oliver Jeffers (middle) with astrophysicist professor Stephen Smartt (right) and an ‘Earthly astronaut’ in Cambridge. Image: Paul Quezada-Neiman / Alamy

I spent some time in America when I was very young. I got a scholarship to go to a summer camp because the director read a New York Times article about The Troubles and offered a scholarship to a Catholic kid and a Protestant kid. When I was 19, I went back there, back to work at the camp, and I stayed in New York for a couple of days. And I just fell in love with New York City. It was like everything that you had to be careful about in the UK was celebrated there. Here we have the tallest poppy syndrome, you shouldn’t be above your station. In New York if you tried to do something a little bit different it was openly embraced, and the potential was palpable. You were rewarded for being ambitious and being unique. It felt automatically like home. So I moved there. 

I moved back to Northern Ireland a few years ago. We came back to Belfast, partly because my dad got sick. And then we waited Covid out here, and we started to realise, actually, this might be really good for the kids, to be around some green space and some family. And we looked at what was happening with the very divisive, volatile politics in the US from the perspective of the other side of the ocean. I thought, this reminds me of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I’d written off Northern Ireland as a place to live again, but when I came back to it, I realised, the people here are wonderful. The place is wonderful. 

2025: Oliver Jeffers taking part in The Atlantic Climate Week event in New York. Image: Marc Patrick / BFA.com / Shutterstock

The States are very different now to when I moved there. I think people just didn’t realise how deep the sectarian, the racist, the sexist roots of the American patriarchy ran. I moved when Obama had just been elected in and everything felt possible, and there was a confidence; a buoyancy. The future seemed like something everybody was looking forward to, and that has changed radically. 

I do get writer’s block. That’s happened a couple of times. And I’ve learned that if I just remove myself from all stimuli and go somewhere quiet and stare at a wall for a while you can’t help but think and come up with ideas. If I were to get through the list of projects that I’ve half conceived in notebooks by the end of my life, I’d be doing well. What might happen is that some of those ideas become irrelevant, or I’ve moved on as a person. But there was a time a few years ago when I thought, I need a new book idea and I don’t have one. Am I washed up? I borrowed my dad’s car and went up to the north coast of Northern Ireland. The radio wasn’t working. I forgot my phone. So it was just me staring at the wall for a full day, and I came up with three book ideas in that trip. 

Since I became a father the intention to speak about the state of the world has become much, much stronger. I didn’t necessarily think it was my place to say those things before but then I looked around thinking, who else is saying these things? Who else is writing kids’ books about climate change? I want to be able to look my kids in the eye and say that I tried to say the right thing at the right time.  

If I could have just one more conversation with anyone it would be my mum. Because the first book was dedicated to her, and she got to see the start of it, but she never got to see it finish. I would love to ask her about her life because I think I was a lot more like her than my dad. It would be great to talk to her with that sense of maturity now that I’m approaching 50, and I’m more aware of my own mortality and finiteness. I would love to be able to just understand her a bit more. 

My happiest time? That’s a very tricky one. My mind flies to several different places: being in the studio painting, and it’s all going well; being a kid playing football in the street. Then again, honestly, I think probably playing football with my son and daughter, combining football and tickle monster in the front garden on a late summer day. And I still get to do that, but I’ve probably only got two or three years left when they’re still interested. So I make the most of it.

I’m Very Busy: A (nearly forgotten) birthday book by Oliver Jeffers is out now (HarperCollins, £14.99).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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