Francesca Simon

Francesca Isabella "Frankie" Simon is the creator of the Horrid Henry franchise.
== Overview ==
Francesca Simon was born in St Louis, Missouri, grew up in California, and attended both Yale and Oxford Universities, where she specialized in Medieval Studies. How this prepared her to write children's books she cannot imagine, but it did give her a thorough grounding in alliteration.
She then threw away a lucrative career as a medievalist and worked as a freelance journalist, writing for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Mail on Sunday, Telegraph, and Vogue (US). After her son Joshua was born in 1989, she started writing children's books full time. One of the UK's best-selling children's writers, Francesca has published over 50 books, including the immensely popular Horrid Henry series, which has now sold over fifteen million copies.
Francesca won the Children's Book of the Year in 2008 at the British Book Awards for Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman. Horrid Henry is published in 24 countries and is also an animated CiTV series. She lives in London with her husband, son, and Tibetan Spaniel, Shanti.
==Trivia==
* Francesca came up with the idea for Horrid Henry after an illustrator asked her to write a story about a horrid child as they were bored making "Angel Characters". Perfect Peter was created when Francesca wanted to write up a concept for a series about sibling rivalry and family conflicts.https://web.archive.org/web/20041018100603/http://www.horridhenry.co.uk/How.htmhttps://web.archive.org/web/20041015195254/http://www.horridhenry.co.uk/FAQ.htm
* She has never been paid any royalities or income for any Horrid Henry project produced by Novel Entertainment. The reason why was because of a botched deal involving Orion Books, the publisher of the book series, who sold all non-Book rights to Novel. She claimed that Novel was constantly claiming the franchise was put at a loss for why she wasn't being paid and only a small production fee when the series was first put into production. She also accused Orion for failing to use a lawyer when drawing up a negociation contract with Novel.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367292/It-s-not-fair-Horrid-Henry-writer-misses-fortune-reveals-never-paid-penny-royalties-screen-adaptations-books.html
** This deal is likely the reason why the book franchise and media franchise are essentually seperated from each other.
*Francesca has stated during a Q&A at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that she does not like the TV series nor the film, due to differing from the original books.
Category:Writers