Skrimsli: The tale of a tiger sea-captain and so much more, won the Wales Book of the Year Children’s Award 2024, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, children’s award, and nominated for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing 2025.

Nicola Davies is a broadcaster, children’s writer and environmentalist who has been shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for nature writing for children many times.

Here she talks to Firefly publisher Penny Thomas about the unexpected appearance of Skrimsli (Firefly, 2023), the stunning and complex seafaring tiger who bounded into Carnegie-nominated The Song that Sings Us (Firefly, 2021) halfway through the action and now gets his own prequel!

Both books are set in an alternative world where the evil Automators are taking over the natural world with their expansion and pipelines of ‘black-gold’. Epic tales in their own right, the comparisons with our fossil-fuelled world are telling and unmistakeable.

Both hardbacks also have stunning cover illustrations from friend and internationally renowned illustrator, Jackie Morris.

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Q. So, I don’t need to ask if you are angry about what’s happening to the environment:

A. “Furious – beside myself.”

How do you take that anger and turn it into children’s fiction?

“I suppose I have learnt over the years of thinking about the environment and campaigning for it – and I’ve been doing that over my whole career – and I’ve got better at compartmentalising it: the anxiety, and actually the grief. But the thing that really gets me through is that I have this deep-rooted belief, also rooted my scientific training, about the resilience of the natural world. I am continually finding small examples of things to give me hope. I came across this marvellous piece of research about seagrass meadows in the Caribbean, where they put go-pro cameras on the heads of tiger-sharks hunting turtles. And they found that the seagrass meadows are hugely more extensive than previously thought. And accidental rewilding going on in a massive scale in places like Romania and northern Europe, wolves doing really well, forests doing really well, and the area round Chernobyl is now a complete wildlife haven. That gives me hope.”

That’s sounds like the start of the rebellion in The Song that Sings Us where you’ve got mushrooms coming up through cracks in the concrete overnight – you can’t stop nature.

“You can’t stop it. It’s not got an agenda; it’s not going to get depressed and give up. Nature has a marvellous indifference to our agendas and our emotions which means it will just keep going in whatever way and in whatever space we leave, that will fill. That’s how I keep going. I just have to not think of things like lorryloads of pangolin scales and mountains of burning ivory, and powdered seahorses being made into obscure tablets.”

Which came first, the interest in animals, the writing, or the concern for the environment?

“The interest in animals I was born with. I don’t remember a time that wasn’t the most interesting thing to me, and the thing that lit up my heart and my soul. And the desire to protect and conserve absolutely went hand in hand with that because from a very early age I was aware of the threats to the environment, and although my first efforts when I was 8, 9, 10, were very species-focused; I was collecting for Gerald Durell’s charities. I was a very shy kid, but I can remember the only time I wasn’t shy was when I was standing up in front of the class, telling them about this, when I was something like 11.

I did a natural sciences degree at Cambridge and I specialised in zoology but I’m not a mathematician. I graduated in 1980 when Mrs Thatcher was cutting research jobs, and I had pretty much decided anyway that I didn’t want to preach to the choir. I went to the BBC’s natural history unit in Bristol and as a result of that, started to write and to realise that I could write, and acknowledge that I had always wanted to write – I looked back and had to own up to myself that that’s what I wanted to do – but it took me ten years to get the courage to be able to take the first step. It happened by accident, I was asked to be a consultant on a picture book about blue whales, and in the end the publisher asked me to write it. Then I did three adult novels because I got a humorous column in The Independent, written under a pen name, and I was approached to write a novel, I panicked because I’d never written anything so long. Then I thought, it’s just chapters, and that’s how I did it.”

So, in The Song that Sings Us and Skrimsli: the Automators, the baddies – are they all bad?

“They’re not all bad, because they have people working for them who are ordinary people, who are not bad. But they have an ignorant and narrow view of how the world of how it operates. They don’t understand that the natural world, the sum total of life, is as essential to humans as it is to itself. They don’t get that; they think it is a resource to be mined. And in opposition to them is, unlike us, a society that has never lost the values of indigenous people, which know that natural resources are finite and that you overstep the limits at your peril. And that’s the knowledge and the mindset that we are staggering, crawling, clawing our way back to.”

So, in the book they are presented as evil characters, but what they represent is our common received wisdom.

“That’s why I wanted to turn it round – for the received wisdom to be what we want to get back to. And the very powerful challenge to that is very beguiling. It’s very beguiling to say to people who have been limited by nature that they don’t have to accept those limits, you can transcend all of that, we can exploit it, we can be the masters. That’s a very beguiling ideology, and we’ve all lived by it.

The thing that tied indigenous society to sustainability was the carbon cycle. You have this much primary productivity from the green stuff, and if you use that up, by the time you’ve got to the top of the ecological cycle, you starve; it’s that simple. But if you put stored sunlight, which is what fossil fuel is, into the system, then you can live outside that loop for a while, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve burned, I don’t know – two hundred million years of photosynthesis in two hundred years. We’ve used up two hundred million years of stored sunlight, in the blink of an eye geologically speaking.”

It sounds obvious when you say it; why do you think people still don’t get it?

“Because nobody explains it … I do a lot of shouting at the radio!”

Do you ever consider just going on marches or tying yourself to railings?

“I used to when I was younger. I did lots of stuff for CND in the late seventies, early eighties. I did lots of marches about conserving whales. I have been known to throw paint bombs at banks to get them to disinvest from apartheid. So I have done that. But now I think my best weapon is my work, and the more time I spend doing that, and that includes talking and listening to young people, and telling them that it is a very sane response to be angry, and that to inherit a planet that isn’t broken is their right. What I am interested in is what the kids are going to inherit and what it’s going to be like for them.”

When did you start writing to give animals a voice, like in The Song that Sings Us?

“I wrote a middle grade called A Girl called Dog, which was the first thing I wrote for me, without a commission. There is a character in there who is a parrot who has learnt to use human speech. I wrote his words in an ambiguous way so that it’s open to interpretation whether he’s using these learned phrases or whether he really understands what he’s saying. There was a linguistic researcher who worked with an African grey parrot, and her research into how he acquired language and how he used it – he’s called Alex the parrot, he’s very famous on the internet – I think pretty clearly demonstrates that that was a window into another mind.

Talking animal characters are such familiar tropes in children’s fiction but they can be such a missed trick, because if you really think about that – I mean, never mind about talking to aliens – you are talking to another being, with a completely different sensory experience, a completely different body, a completely different perspective, that would be incredible. There’s a guy who is working on sperm whales, and the recordings of them plus the context, might mean that in a decade, we could speak whale. And at the beginning of covid, there was a guy who was working with dogs to diagnose covid, and you just wonder what happened to that. The dogs were getting it right every time.”

With Song, there’s and edge between polemic and just telling a story. How do you navigate that? You have a weapon of mass destruction called the Greenhouse, which isn’t subtle, but it works.

“It’s the characters: like the baddy, is such a cartoon baddy – and he has a very high opinion of himself. So I think I navigate it through the characters because they are very real to me. The story comes from the characters, and the action is generated by them, and when I get stuck in a story it’s not because I don’t know what happens next, it’s just because I don’t know what they do next and I just need to think about harder about what they do and who they are, and then I get the solution. If you do character first, then I think that’s what makes it work.”

Tell me about the places and the names on the map in the world of Song and Skrimsli.

“Names are really important to me, so I chose names that are in some way drawn from our world, so that when readers see them, something may be triggered in their heads. The world comes out of the characters too. When I was thinking about Torren and where she would go, I knew she would go to mountains, and I knew what those mountains would be like. And then just things that come from your subconscious.

Like at the beginning of Skrimsli, I don’t know why, but I knew from the first second I started thinking about it, I know like it was something I had remembered, or had read in a non-fiction book, I knew he was born in a circus and the circus was stranded in the snow. I could see it like a photograph, but I have no idea where that came from.”

What do you want readers to take from the stories particularly?

“Curiousity about the natural world, and a taste for adventure, and the idea that it is possible to live a life not in a conventional way. I always think of that lovely line from Ian Dury ‘a little slice of the cake of liberty’ and that’s what I want them to have. And that also carries responsibility for them, it’s a very grown-up concept, not just sex,
drugs and rock and roll.”

Apart from Skrimsli the tiger obviously, do you have a favourite character in this book?

“I love the gula – the wolverine. And I grew unexpectedly fond of Blit the dog. She thought she was a wolf, but the bottom line was she was never a wolf like she thought she was, she was always a little dog, and that was never going to end well for her. But I really loved her. And I think I’ve got huge, huge respect for Owl, and how he finds himself and how he learns to stand up and look the world in the eye.”

Skrimsli is perhaps more of a straightforward, epic story than Song; which did you prefer?

There are big themes about colonialism, international business and how governments can behave really badly in Skrimsli, and that’s kind of the idea I started with in my head, but always the strongest theme was going to be about identity, as soon as I started thinking about the combination of Skrimsli’s tiger nature, and his experience of being raised with human language in his head. I think language has a profound effect on the thoughts that we can think, and I was really interested in exploring how that would make Skrimsli develop. And as soon as I thought about his story arc around his identity, all the other characters have their identity to sort out and eventually come to terms with. The Palatine has her identity handed to her on a plate. Kal has a dual identity that they struggle with and eventually come to terms with, in a way that isn’t defined by anyone but Kal. And Owl similarly is an abused child. And his physical difference is a metaphor for the way that the bodies of abused children carry their experiences. I feel very closely connected to that stuff, not because I was abused myself, I wasn’t, and not in a campaigning way, it’s just that I know that every audience of kids I see, there will be more than one kid, maybe five, maybe more, who have had terrible childhood trauma. And I really wanted to give them a character in whom they could see themselves reflected. And that’s why when Owl says, ‘I don’t look like you’, and he’s thinking I’ll never be tall and handsome like you are, ‘but you’re stuck in your story and I’m not’. We can choose to tell a different story. And that theme of the power of stories being away to heal ourselves and also to find a new direction in the world. Stories come first, we have to tell a different story and then we make it real.”

If you could tell the story of our world, what would you like to happen now?

“I’d like the penny to drop. I’d like there to be a Song day, when everybody gets it, feels it in their heads and their hearts in their bodies: how we are part of this world, and that everything in every cell we are connected to every living thing around us, that their story is absolutely our story and I think if we really, really understood that, then everything else would follow from that. So many things about our behaviour would become immediately ridiculous and not fit for purpose.”

The sea is your favourite environment – what is it about it?

“It’s my home! I don’t know why. I don’t come from a seafaring background. My father always said he was the only person who got seasickness in the canoe sequence of How the West Was Won. He would never go on a boat. We would never go on a boat when we came to Solva in Pembrokeshire, because boats where bad. But I would stay in the sea until I was crinkly and blue: I grew up in St Albans and Birmingham, nowhere near the sea, but because my parents were from the Gower, they would come back to south Wales. And although I’ve moved around loads, the one constant was Pembrokeshire and the sea: I just love it.”

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