In the first of two conversations recorded for the Eastbourne LitFest podcast, Dame Jacqueline Wilson sits down with Festival Director Jane Branson and lifelong fan Anna Branson to talk about a writing life that has now produced an average of two and a half books a year.

She reflects on her post-war childhood in a house with few books, on the local library that fed her omnivorous reading, and on knowing at the age of six — much to her mother’s astonishment the night before her tonsil operation — that she wanted to be a writer. She traces the chance newspaper advert that took her to Dundee at seventeen to work for DC Thomson, and the writing routine she still keeps today: mornings in pyjamas, another quiet hour before supper while her wife cooks.

She lifts the lid just a little on her new book, Esme Pepper, due this autumn — another girl in care, but a very different girl from Tracy Beaker, and one whose story somehow involves garden gnomes. Answering questions sent in by local schoolchildren and Instagram followers, she explains why she writes about children at the edges of family life rather than the comfortable middle, which of her own characters she’d most like to live as, the one subject she long resisted writing about, and the classic she thinks is overdue a fresh retelling.

Part two picks up with the question we leave hanging here: if she could give every child three books at birth, what would they be?