Benji Davies in conversation about the success of The Storm Whale and the busy year ahead

In a strange twist of fate, I last bumped into author-illustrator Benji Davies on a flight to Inverness, when he was on his way to Spey Bay’s Scottish Dolphin Centre to deliver events centred around his award-winning picture book The Storm Whale. Almost five years later, we are chatting over Zoom about the 10th anniversary of the book and a new addition to the series, The Great Storm Whale, to be published by Simon & Schuster Children’s Books in October. 

The Storm Whale was the first title that Davies wrote as well as illustrated, after working in animation and illustrating a few books. He says of the transition into writing: “I had done various bits and pieces, and I was really looking to develop my portfolio. I was thinking, ‘Where can I go creatively with my work?’ I was looking for my own voice in my illustration, a voice that was going to make it a bit more directional.” Inspiration struck on a day trip to the seaside town of Whitstable in Kent. “I was just looking for references, like I always do, and I saw some fisherman’s huts and I thought, ‘Oh they look really interesting’.” He took some photographs of the buildings and then drew sketches from these, which he developed into artwork using Photoshop; that image later became the opening spread of The Storm Whale.

The idea for the plot came from an animated film that Davies had created at university, which told the story of a little boy who finds a whale on the beach, takes it home and puts it in the bath. When his fisherman father comes home, he discovers the whale and they take it back out to sea. As an artist, Davies is “always kind of collecting together things, so when I saw these beach huts and I sat down to do this piece of artwork, I put the dad and the boy into this image fairly spontaneously, I think. I was like, ‘Oh, this could be where they live.’ I suppose it just came quite naturally.”

As he was already doing some illustrations for Simon & Schuster, he showed then-art director Nia Roberts the image of the beach huts, which piqued her interest. After explaining the backstory, Davies shared his animated film with Roberts and then-editorial director Emma Blackburn, who encouraged him to continue developing it in book form. He revisited the sketchbooks and storyboarding he had done when making the film and “then I was trying to pull out the story, I suppose”. This process took “probably about two to three years”, as Davies was fitting it around his animation work. When he felt the book was ready, he went back to Simon & Schuster, who signed it. After Davies put the finishing touches to the artwork, the book was published in 2013 to critical acclaim, including winning the inaugural Oscar’s Book Prize.

I get feedback quite often through people messaging me from Brazil or from the Netherlands, all over the world, saying that it’s their child’s favourite book.

One of the greatest achievements for Davies is the fact that The Storm Whale has been published in 39 territories and reached children worldwide. He says: “I get feedback quite often through people messaging me from Brazil or from the Netherlands, all over the world, saying that it’s their child’s favourite book. It’s really quite incredible.”

A decade after its publication, Simon & Schuster is publishing an 10th-anniversary edition of The Storm Whale. “The honour of having that happen is great,” Davies tells me. The jacket for the new edition has “given it a bit of a facelift”, featuring a “key familiar moment in the story” instead of the original cover image. The reissue includes a note from Davies about the origins of the story, while the hardback version includes a limited-edition art print.

Later this year, Davies is returning to the world of The Storm Whale with a fourth book in the series, following on from 2016’s The Storm Whale in Winter and 2018’s Grandma Bird. He says of the inspiration behind it: “Whenever I’ve been working on one book, there are always other ideas that come along that don’t fit in with the pattern of the story that I’m writing, which then subconsciously sit there and kind of mix together. This one just felt like a natural continuation from the Grandma Bird story, where I had introduced her. I felt like it would be interesting for [the series’ main character] Noi to know more about his grandma. So that’s really where this story came from.”

The first three Storm Whale books are currently being developed into a series of three half-hour animated films by Lupus Films, the team who worked on the award-winning TV adaptation of Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea. “We’re still in the process of that happening at the moment,” says Davies. “But they have developed a script and teaser animation, and they had a big launch of that last summer at Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France. Currently, Lupus is in talks with people about broadcasting it. So it’s not been made, it’s in pre-production phase at the moment.”

A busy year ahead

Davies is also looking at developing some of his other properties into animation, as well as writing longer-form children’s projects alongside his picture books. He says: “A lot of that is still very early days. I’m honestly just trying to find time to actually do things that aren’t commissioned pieces of work, artworks which have the freedom to breathe in their own space.” This summer, there will be an exhibition of his art which is “partly related to the 10th anniversary of The Storm Whale” at Los Angeles gallery Nucleus. 

In terms of further promotion around the anniversary edition and The Great Storm Whale, plans are still underway but Davies promises “lots of activity”, including bookshop tours and festival appearances, as well as “a lot of reflecting on The Storm Whale itself”. He laughs: “I think it’s going to be quite busy this year.”