Jeremy Strong's world: poetry, accidents and bedtime scribbles Jeremy Strong, 63, has written 98 books and won a number of awards, including the Red House Children's Book Award for The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog in 1997. There's a Viking in My Bed was dramatised for the BBC, and several of his books have been adapted for radio. His latest, My Brother's Famous Bottom Gets Crowned! (Puffin), is out on Thursday. Strong has two grown-up children and two stepdaughters. He lives in Wiltshire with his second wife, Gillie, and their three cats. Award There are two parts to the Children's Book Award - there's a silver bowl [pictured], which you get to keep, and the other part is a silver book with pages listing all the previous winners, including Roald Dahl, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo, and then your name gets added. I felt pretty chuffed. At the end of the year I had to hand it on to the next winner, JK Rowling. Photo: James King. Cow I dedicated a story called Krazy Kow Saves the World - Well Almost to a friend called Hal, who I met at the Edinburgh book festival when he was six. In return he sent me a plastic flying cow [pictured], which he thought looked like Krazy Kow. Not entirely satisfied with that, he found a fluffy toy cow and his mother made a spotty cloak and mask and giant "udderpants." These two cows sum up the relationships you can have with your readers. Hal is now 19 and we still meet up. Accidents I recently walked into a glass door and split my head open. It was fairly serious and it needed stitches. I've had lots of stitches from accidents as a child - nowadays they use superglue. The nurse told me that the previous week a boy had come in with the same injury and she had managed to get her hand stuck to his forehead, but luckily she was wearing a rubber glove so she was able to take her hand away. That image of a boy with a rubber glove stuck to his head has to go in a story somewhere. I get my ideas from all kinds of random places. Painting This is called A Rainy Day [pictured] and it was done by my son, Daniel, when he was five years old. It's done in that wonderful way that children paint - without self-consciousness. It represents the child's world, and how they see things. It's always been in the room where I work; it helps keeps me rooted in their world. Bedtime scribbles I always have notebooks by the bed. Occasionally a whole chunk of text will appear in my head at 2am - I'll have a conversation between characters and I have to get it down immediately. So sometimes that means getting a book out and writing for an hour or two. It's useful, but annoying.