You are to be receive the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards next week. What does that mean to you?

It’s totally unexpected. I’m delighted to have been picked. I am at the end of a very stressful decade in which my wife Rosaleen died of Alzheimer’s. So this is a lovely thing to happen.

You have written more than 200 books: eight children’s series; more than 50 picture books, which alone have sold more than 18 million copies; more than 20 chapter books for children; more than 20 books for older children under the pseudonym Catherine Sefton. Which stand out for you?

I don’t like making a choice between them. I don’t think that way. I’ve covered a vast range of different types of books. There are obviously books that have been lucky. And there are books that have been deservedly successful and some that haven’t. But in each case I was trying to do different things.

You are an awards veteran. In 1989, you and Barbara Firth won the Kurt Maschler Award for The Park in the Dark. It recognises one British ‘work of imagination for children, in which text and illustration are integrated so that each enhances and balances the other’. Tell me about working with illustrators?

There isn’t much collaboration. There are a lot of people who can do lovely illustrations, but they haven’t got the stories. When I got involved with Walker Books, Sebastian Walker sent me to Bologna book fair with Barbara Firth and Angela Barrett, who did The Hidden Heist with me and is one of the best children’s illustrators, and we were all to look at what can be done in picture book. And we all three became famous figures afterwards. The brief for me was to provide stories which had emotional punch. Children’s novelists tend to do very complicated stories which are about adult preoccupations rather than the things the children are actually concerned about: I don’t like the dark; it isn’t fair; I want my mummy. Those are all short sentences, which a very small child can understand, without having to explain.

[ Martin Waddell: A little comfort for the childrenOpens in new window ]

In 2004 you were awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest accolade for a writer of children’s books. You said in your acceptance speech that the world of children’s books is, as it should be, a world that recognises no frontiers, but also that children need the affirmation of their own national identity, their own place, in stories told in the cadence and idiom of their everyday speech.

If I’m reading a book about somewhere, I want to be taken to that somewhere. You have to give small instances and intimate instances.

You have cited three great influences: your editor at Walker Books, David Lloyd; your agent, Gina Pollinger; and family friend Terence Pim. Tell us about them.

Gina was continually prompting me, she really fought for her writers. She made me write a paragraph about why each book should be published. She was often quite fierce in her criticism of what you were doing, but always encouraging, always pushing in the right direction.

Terence was an actor, largely unemployed. He was a kind of magic person. He used to visit me here and devoted a lot of time to telling me Celtic myths as if it was all happening in Newcastle. I think I was slow learning to read because the telling of the stories was so good.

David Lloyd was an ex-circus clown, a very eccentric man. We had a very intense relationship. I would collect a number of stories and he would come over and spend a week or so with me here and he’d go back with four or five books, which we got by walking around in the woods and on the beach arguing about how best to tell the stories.

As Catherine Sefton, you wrote for older children and young adults, including books set during the Troubles

The Beat of the Drum is about a guy who gets on the wrong side of the UDA. Frankie’s Story is a girl who gets on the wrong side of the IRA. I did actually write the same book twice. They are identical in structure. It’s just one reflects the Catholic side, one reflects the Protestants.

How would you compare your works about the Troubles to Joan Lingard’s?

I think she’s brilliant but she’s not half as harsh; it’s almost lyrical. In mine, one boy’s close friend gets killed for informing; and in the Frankie story, the girl gets a petrol bomb thrown through the window into her face. My son, who’s the writer, looked out of the house one morning and said there’s something happening down at the crossroads. And a policeman had just been shot in the back of the neck. So that’s what started me off. I don’t give explanations. I posed questions. The object is to make people think, not to write propaganda. I’m Irish, we’ve been here since 1678. I wrote a book called A Little Bit British, an adaptation of a diary of a nobody to the events of the start of the Troubles. I think my temper got the better of me.

You have also written for adults. Otley was adapted into a 1968 comedy spy movie starring Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider. Tell us more

My agent said what I was writing was flat and not very funny but I had a junk stall in Camden Market and he liked my anecdotes about it. That became Otley, which was made into a film and that gave me the money to sit at home and learn how to write. I told my agent I’m going home to Ireland to get a cheap house and I’m going to write books for children.

The Troubles had a huge impact on your life

I’d been keeping my eye on the small Catholic church in Donaghadee as there had been attempts to burn it. I saw some youths running out of it laughing, and I went to check what was happening. I saw a thing like a wasp’s nest and that’s the last thing I remember. I was told that if I’d been six inches forward or six inches back, there wouldn’t have been a body. Apparently some sort of vacuum forms when there’s an explosion. The bomb went up and the church came down on top of me. Luckily somebody had seen me go in, otherwise I’d have just been buried. I had a big slice across my neck, but nothing vital, and was sliced across the right arm. My eardrums were burst, but I was left more or less wrecked. Remember, I’d made the breakthrough, I’m now a professional writer but when I got blown up, I was no longer fit to do that. I lost several years.

You are best known for your children’s books featuring anthropomorphic animals including the Little Bear series, Owl Babies and Farmer Duck. How important was becoming a father to you as a writer?

My wife had to go to work. And I stayed at home, looking after the kids. And at the time I was writing teenage children’s novels, which were really good, I’m very proud of, but I couldn’t write until the children were asleep. And the great difficulty was to get them to go to sleep. Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? is always read by people as being very gentle. In fact, I was irritated because I wanted to write my books. But those four or five years, where I paid close attention to three small boys, that’s where I got into doing these picture books. I thought this was a thing that was keeping me away from my real work. And it actually was the basis of what became my work.

You are from literary stock?

My great-aunt Helen Waddell wrote Peter Abelard, a very famous novel in the 1930s. When I published my first book, I had to do a signing session in Belfast and a whole lot of ladies in pearls turned up and bought this book, which was a thriller about an antique dealer getting involved with spies, so I suspect a lot of copies were thrown out with the rubbish. Rutherford Mayne, the actor and playwright, was my great-uncle.

What are you working on now?

I’m 83 and the writing has left me. It’s very sad. I’m painting now. I’ve got the emotional sense, I’ve got the picture sense but I haven’t the craft to do it properly. But I’m enjoying it and that’s the main thing.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Only once, and that was by accident. I was doing a short piece for radio about Maria Edgeworth but no one in Edgeworthstown was interested. They all directed me to a statue of Oliver Goldsmith in a neglected, overgrown field, but the hand which holds the pen and the fingers have been broken off.

What is the best writing advice you have heard?

The important thing is to find your own voice, to not copy other people, and it’s very difficult because you do tend to start off trying to write like writers you admire and it doesn’t work that way.

Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?

The BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

Which public event affected you most?

The re-election of Donald Trump, which completely horrifies me.

The most remarkable place you have visited?

An ancient churchyard on a lake in Loughinisland, about 10 miles from here in Co Down. I go there to be at peace.

Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?

I wouldn’t invite any of them. Writers are surprisingly ordinary and also egotistical. The heartfelt answer is: my wife.

The best and worst things about where you live, Newcastle, Co Down?

The best thing is the beauty of the skies in the morning. I live looking out at the big, big sea and at this moment I’m looking at an intricate sky, grey and blue. The worst thing is the council are planning on pending several million pounds on putting in a gondola system to take people up the mountain.

What is your favourite quotation?

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em. And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Who is your favourite fictional character?

Lewis Eliot from the CP Snow series, Strangers and Brothers.

A book to make me laugh?

Bed-Sit by Mel Calman, a book of cartoons about a little man alone in his bedsit.

A book that might move me to tears?

Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs. Manon of the Springs by Marcel Pagnol.